MSI Ti4600 versus Gainward Ti4400
 

Since there are already 1001 vidcard reviews on the net AND Tom's Hardware recently published an overview of all the videocards of the last 100 years, I wont be completing my review and vidcard database. It has lost sense for me. I dont want to fall in repetition, so I chose to put my time is some more usefull stuff (as there is the Swiftech Qpower howto)
This doesnt mean I haven't already started with the Vidcards review. So I will show you what I got so far, Hope you find something of use in his :) )


All videocards used in these benchmarks and reviews were kindly "donated" by Comtechnology! I would like to thank them for being so kind to lend me these fine pieces of hardware!

So here's my Review of

MSI Ti4600 versus Gainward Ti4400

Test systems:

- Epox 8KHA+
- XP1600+ @ 1785Mhz
- 256Mb Corsair PC2400 RAM

Only SpecViewPerf bench was run on:
- Asus P4T-E
- Pentium 4 1.6@2.0Ghz
- 128Mb Apacer RDRAM


Gainward Ti4400

The Gainward comes in a flashy box sporting the statement: "Golden Sample"
This leads to believe that this videocard is pretty high quality, and overclocking should be a success. Let's hope so...

Contents of Box

In the box you will find these items:
- The Videocard (duh!)
- An extensive user manual
- CD with drivers and overclocking/tweaking utilities
- CD with InterVideo Software
- CD with the game Serious Sam
- CD with WinDVD player
- A DVI-to-VGA Adapter
- Splittor to VIVO
- a "Powered by Gainward" Casebadge(click here to see)


The Card


While I was placing the card I noticed it was alot bigger then the previous nvidia cards. So I decided to compare them.


Overclocking

The DDR ram on the Gainward is Samsung 3.6ns, which corresponds to 550Mhz total.
If you install all the utilities provided by Gainward, you get to chose a normal and enhanced mode. In normal the card works at 275/550, enchanced overclocks the card to 280/580. This gives a very slight boost in performance

3DMark2001 Default Bench 1024x768 32bit:
- Normal: 10877
- Enhanced: 10925

Quake 3 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail demo2:
- Normal: 126
- Enhanced: 131

Jedi Knight II 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail:
- Normal: 81
- Enhanced: 83

This improvement is not noticeable in games. So I decided to see how far I could push this card. Without any extra cooling & in a closed case enviroment I got the card stable at 310/610.Core speed is more then Ti4600 default (320), memory speed would do better if extra cooling was applied, but I was aiming for average working situation.


Not gaming related

While testing this card I was very pleased with the 2D quality in Windows. Playing DVD's was a joy.
But I didn't stop there.

I connected a second screen and after one reboot I was enjoying full dualscreen pleasures!

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MSI GF4 Ti4600

Contents of Box
- a very good user manual
- 9 cd-roms with software:
- MSI DVD player
- drivers and utilities;
- InterVideo WinCoder/WinProducer
- InterVideo WinCoder/WinProducer SP
- Sacrifice game (full)
- AquaNox game (full)
- No One Lives Forever (full)
- MSI Games Collection: 7 demos of the latest games
- S-Video extender
- S-Video-to-RCA adapter

I didn't find a DVI-to-VGA converter however, so I had to use my own to test the Dualscreen function, which worked exactly the same as with the Ti4400.


The Card

The card has a flashy see-through cooler but no ram sinks :(
Other than that all pretty standard, although most Ti4600 cards come with dual DVI connectors at the back.
The TV-Out/Video-In connections makes this card more then just "for gaming". I wasn't able to test these functions so I wont make any judgements on them, hopefully in the future I get the right material together to perform all the necessary tests.


Overclocking

The memory chips are also produced by Samsung this time with a 2.8 ns access time which corresponds to 357 (714) MHz. The card works at 325 (650) MHz.
On first boot into windows, I checked the speeds, and no matter how many reinstalls, I ended up with a core of 300 and memory running at 660! Mhz (10Mhz higher then default). No clue why, but a little bit of free speed for the non-overclockers.
As with the Gainward, I didn't use extra cooling. I ended up with a core at 320Mhz and memory at 680Mhz. This gave a good boost over default performance, but ain't very spectacular.



BENCHMARKS

Cards at default speeds:


Cards overclocked to max stable speeds:


Conclusion
2 very fast videocards. If you are into videoediting and want extreme performance you have not much choice, MSI it is. But if you don't care about the extra's, it is hard to go wrong with the Ti4400 from Gainward, which performs very closely to the MSI Ti4600! at a considerably lower price!

My choice: Gainward Ti4400. But with the Ti4200 around the corner it would not be so wise to go out and buy a videocard NOW. Reports of Ti4200 overclocking to Ti4600 speeds are not rare, so holding on to your EURO's and $$ for a little longer might be wise.

JMke OUT