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

Installing the card

I decided to compare the Ti4600 to Gainward's Ti4200, and Visiontek's Geforce 3 (my old video card). The card is definitely longer, but the real surprise is that even the Geforce 3 is longer than the Ti4200, though this really doesn't mean anything as the Ti4200 is obviously taller, it was just a little surprise. Another interesting thing to note is the difference in size between the RAM sinks on the Ti4600 and the Geforce 3. The Ti4600 ram sinks are actually smaller, and this may be due to the RAM running at a lower voltage, thus creating less heat to dissipate. If you are wondering, I will be reviewing the Ti4200 as well; look for that in the coming weeks.
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I have heard about the size of the Ti4600s, and how they aren't fitting into certain motherboards (EPOX is the only one I know of), due to a misplaced capacitor. I didn't have any problem fitting the lengthy card into my MSI KT267 Pro R board, though the IDE cables connecting my drives to the onboard RAID had to be moved out of the way. You can see from the picture above and to the right that the Geforce 3 fits into the motherboard easily. I just wanted to show it for comparison. The picture below and to the left shows the Ti4600 installed, and if you look closely you can see the BGA soldering I mentioned before; notice the lack of external connectors on the memory. I decided to add the lower-right picture so you could see different perspective of the installed Ti4600.
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After securing the DVI to VGA connector to the card, all I had to do was put the case back together, fire up the computer, install the drivers, and benchmark til my heart's content. I will admit though, I think the first couple days I had this card, all I did was play all my games at the highest resolution I could. Mouth agape in ecstasy, while I played everything at 1280x1024x32 with 4x FSAA. It was dreamy…whoops…Earth to The Sheriff, come back…now on the benchmarks and overclocking.

Next Page --Benchmarking the card--