Last year Visiontek was the biggest supplier of graphics cards in the retail market within North America. Few know that this company only entered the competitive retail chain in May 2001. One would be fooled however to think Visiontek is a new name in the business. The roots date back to 1988 when four friends decided to venture in the future memory market. The production division specializes in manufacturing not only graphics cards but memory, compact flash and Firewire products. For a company so quick to benefit from increased sales it now has opened up its offices in both London (UK) and Aachen (Germany). Does this pose a threat to the likes of Gainward, Leadtek, or Asus to name but just a few? That's what we're here to find out, do they truly have the quality products to earn them the top spot? Tweak3d.net investigates.

No family would be complete if it wasn't for its members. In the case of the Geforce4 it is no different. The three Ti's (4200, 4400 and 4600) take on the hard labor while the other three MX's (420, 440 and 460) handle the less demanding tasks. Each member performs slightly differently due to its higher or lower clock speed both in GPU and memory segments. The clear divide is between the MX and Ti, somewhat like brother and sister. Of course one would be fooled to believe Nvidia is churning away making 6 different chips for the desktop market. As with AMD and Intel through Nvidia and ATI, if a given chip won't perform at the frequency you require it is graded and sold as a lower rating. Fair or not this happens every day in semiconductor plants around the globe; it makes you wonder how much profit the big boys really do make. Without much further discussion let’s take a quick look and the numbers reflecting in part their strength.

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