What's a person to do when an MX seems too unexciting and a Ti4400/4600 too overwhelming with its high price tag? The Ti4200 fills the gap nicely and offers substantial gains in performance over its MX counterparts to offer a more pleasant and satisfying 3D experience. Featuring the same architecture as the other Ti's (Ti4400, Ti4600) it may do all they can but at a smaller price. The secret hides within its clock/memory speed which is slightly down rated from the Ti4400 model but you still do get 128MB of memory. This in practice means a 250MHz core and 444MHz memory speed. These figures are still pretty beefy and should offer pleasing performance. The memory on the card is made by Samsung and is rated at 4ns which in practice should mean overclocking to 500MHz will be a piece of cake. At the time we got our Ti4200 sample Visiontek already decided to change the cooling on it's Ti series and as a result this model is the first we received to feature a blue orb cooler. As a reminder the other Ti's we have are cooled by a Nvidia reference cooler.

While this card is a full octane Geforce4 Ti model its green PCB design doesn't make it look too alike in comparison to its Ti4400/Ti4600 friends. The PCB is about 1/4th the length shorter than both the more powerful Ti's and therefore closer resembles the length of Geforce3 cards from the previous generation. The layout itself has changed slightly but the image still represents a densely populated design. The beneficial thing about the shorter length will be problem free installation of this card into mini cases. The bracket reminds oneself of a deja vu featuring the same HD-15, DVI and SVHS OUT connectors.

The Ti4200 seems to identify itself as an enemy to the ATI Radeon 8500. Its similar pricing and greater horsepower almost claims it victory right away. On top of that overclocking it will only make the issue more visible thus produce even greater value for money. While on the cheaper side of the bargain the Ti4200 will run circles round any MX without even a symbolic hiccup. Where the MX440 runs out of steam the Ti4200 takes over and offers faster office productivity and most importantly punchy 3D performance for a little extra money. After having examined three Ti models in this review we feel (as the benchmark results will show themselves) that the Ti4200 is an entry level card deserving your prime attention should your be out shopping for a powerful yet relatively cheap buy.

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