Best Value High End Card (nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4400)

Member Name: Meshek

Product:	nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4400
Date:	24/06/02 (4122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, Great Features, Every Conceivable Option

Disadvantages: Still Quite Expensive, Not The Fastest

Introduction and Background
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About a mounth ago I bought one of these cards and I have not looked back since. At present the GeForce 4 Ti 4400 is the second fastest graphics card chipset available at present. (The chipset is the basic chip and design of a graphics card which is produced by one company, in this case nvidia, and which is then incorporated by another company, in my case asus, into the graphics card). The Geforce 4 series was released a few months ago to compete with ATi's new 8000 series chipsets which had stolen nvidia's crown for fastest home graphics card chipset. The Geforce 4 series consists of 6 different graphics card chipsets. 3 Low end cards the MX 420, 440 and 460 and 3 high end cards the Ti 4200, 4400 and 4600. In both cases the higher the number the better the card.

Why the Best of these card (in my opinion) is the Ti 4400
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If one is buying a card for themselves I would suggest that in any case one should stay clear of the lowest card in each set (low and high.) The reason for this being is that they are designed for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) these are companies such as dell or compaq who make little or none of their products and mearly rebrand and assemble. Obviously these companies want cheap components and so products marked OEM are either without something like a box or manual or bundled software which is not a problem, or as in this case to make them cheap they are vastly stripped down versions and in my opinion are stripped down more than the price. Also just because it is a Geforce 4 does not mean it is better than Geforce 3 or even Geforce 2 since the mx 420 is slower than almost all of the geforce 2 cards so do not let the name full you.

So that leaves four cards the MX 440 and 460 and the Ti 4400 and 4600. There is nothing wrong asuch with the
MX cards and if one is on a tight budget they are the cards to go for however also do not expect them to play all the latest games with all the trimmings. For me that rules them out and leaves only the Ti 4400 and Ti 4600.

Ti 4400 vs 4600
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There key features are both identical and are as follows.


nfiniteFX II Engine
(Not a very big step but improves graphics slightly anyway.)

Accuview Antialiasing (AA)
(A method of improving the picture quality) would result in about a 50 - 60% drop in frame rate which for most would be unacceptable but with the Geforce 4 this drop is now about 20% which is much more acceptable).

nView Display Technology
This feature I have not found very useful allow I see how it could be. In the past if you had multiple monitors they acted speerately allthough you could move the mouse and windows between them. With this feature it can make the two monitors act as one with an elogated start bar. This difference is quite subtle and is probobly not very useful for most.)

The features listed here are the only main improvements over the Geforce 3 apart from the speed difference which is not that great. (I would allways suggest buying a geforce 3 over a geforce 4 but if one allready has a geforce 3 I see no real point in upgrading unless you 'need' the latest graphics card.)

Having allready said the features are Identical between the Ti 4400 and 4600 I will come to the main difference, speed.

The speed difference is noticable but small (about 10%) but when in most games one is getting over 100 frames per second this is not very noticable. However the price differecne between the 2 is at about £100 with the Ti 4600 costing arroun
d £280 and the Ti 4400 arround £180 (I bought mine from www.itbutikken.co.uk)and considering one can overclock the Ti 4400 to run at the speed of the Ti 4600 (of course one can overclock the Ti 4600 more but that is not the point). I am now getting a score of 10582 with 3dmark 2001 Second Edition with an Athlon xp 1800+ processor.

More Information about the Ti 4400
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Overall this card is blisteringly fast and can run almost any game with all the special effects at an amazing speed. I find myself almost allways playing games at over 100 frames per second. (Most monitors can only show about 80Hz (refreshes per second).) Most geforce 4 Ti 4400 cards come with a DVI port (LCD port) and a VGA port with a DVI to VGA converter so one can run to screens on one card. Most cards also have video out facillity and some also have video in and 3d glasses as options as well.

Conclusion
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At the moment this card in my opinion is the card to buy. It is very fast (faster than everything except the Ti 4600) and has all the features and options anyone could want. At the moment the other chipset manufacturers like ATi are just not fast enough to compete with this card. However in a few months I am almost certain a new ATi card will come out and that will change every thing.

However at the moment this card is in my opinion the best value high end card and unless one has money to burn or simply have to have the fastest card this is the card to buy.

Summary: