Posted: August 7th, 2002
Written by: Justin "The Sheriff" Woods

Initial Impresions and Details

As I opened the box, the stunning red card and its uniquely painted fan immediately impressed me. As I removed the contents from the box, I was happy to see the included pair of DVI to VGA connectors, and S-video/component dongle. The only disappointment is the weak game uh, "bundle". While Serious Sam is a cool game, it doesn't make full use of the card's features. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, or Comanche 4 would have been a better inclusion. Considering this card comes with the same hefty price tag as other Ti4600s, the inclusion of the addition 3-port firewire card, the award winning WinDVD and WinProducer, and accessories makes up for the lack of games, and puts the 750Ultra/XP Golden Sample high on the bang for buck list. Your probably tired of hearing this, but the card is a stunning red. Not only is the PCB red, but the heatsinks are anodized and the fan is painted as well. Not to be outdone by any competitor, Gainward includes a cool image of their company mascot. Also notice the purple components located towards the back of the card. It looks like the engineers were extremely thourough when considering the color scheme. In my opinion, this is an extremely attractive pairing; I think the card looks phenominal. Too bad I don't have a window in my case so I can look at this sexy card all day.
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Below you can see the addition of the anodized heatsinks on the back of the card, which give more than sufficient cooling to the 2.8 nanosecond DDR RAM. Not visible in these photos, the memory on both the front and the back of the card are attached using the newer Ball Grid Array (BGA) soldering technique, which apparently gives a much cleaner connection as well as reduces cost by eliminating the external interconnects. I would surmise the cost reduction to be seen both on the manufacturing of the RAM and the circuit runs within the card itself.
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Finally, you can easily see the inclusion of the Dual DVI connectors. The cool thing about this feature means you don't need to buy an addition adapter if you have a flat panel monitor or a CRT that support DVI (I don't now of any currently available), because Gainward supplied them for you. Short for Digital Visual Interface, a standard developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). DVI transmits digital rather than analog, and has a much higher bandwidth than VGA.The importance of keeping the signal digital is evident in the following example: Let's say the graphics card sends a 1, but because of errors in RAMDAC (Random Access Memory Ditgital to Analog Converter), electrical interference, and normal variations in electricity, the monitor receives .0693 or a 1.035, which causes an aberration in the color. DVI eliminates this because it sends a true digital signal (true 1's and true 0's), so the monitor only gets 0's and 1's, which makes the picture clearer, and allows for much higher resolutions, like 2560x2048 @ 60htz, that is, ahem... if your monitor supports them..(Anandtech.com).

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