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Posted by
Julio
Franco on April 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Visiontek
Products: Xtasy
GeForce4 Ti4600
- Xtasy
GeForce4 Ti4400
Check
for Xtasy
Ti4600 or Ti4400
prices.
 Who
could have imagined that Visiontek would become one of the
most popular videocard makers among US PC enthusiasts in
less than a year?
Even though their operational facilities
have existed for years now, building up a whole new
structure to become a retail manufacturer is no easy job,
and I'm sure getting people's attention is even worse; but
it would seem that Visiontek did everything right for
success, they heard people's needs and learned from its big
partner, NVIDIA, that a product delivered on time, played a
key strategy for itself.
One hard fact that really impressed me
was their recent announcement regarding plans for expanding
operations to the European market, much probably with
NVIDIA's full support after Hercules and other OEM's have
switched to ATI and Creative's uncertain future support
after the 3D Labs acquisition was announced.
So, getting back on our coverage of
Visiontek's latest videocards we can tell that once again
Xtasy boards were early to the market, being the first ones
to be available on store shelves, but not by much this
time... unlike with GF3 Ti boards, a couple of months ago,
this time around we are going to see most major OEMs
offering similar cards based on GF4 chips given that these
are expected to have a much larger life cycle. For this same
reason, I'm expecting card makers to offer the best product
possible at the lowest price to compete with the rest of
manufacturers.
Taking the cards out of the boxes
reminded me of Voodoo5 boards because of their noticeable
larger-than-standard size (yes, the cards are big). There
have been a few reports about cards not fitting well on some
mobos or cases, I'm using a MSI K7T Turbo mobo on a standard
ATX case and had zero trouble fitting any of the cards
though, looking at the pictures below you will notice the
large number of transistors located in the back of the
boards, those are commonly the ones people have trouble
with.
You can see Visiontek decided to go with
the reference HSF design, which IMHO is really cool looking,
no word yet on how effective it is for overclocking purposes
though, we will get to that later on the review. Not too
difficult to notice, what seems to be a more elaborated
VGA port, this change, originally from NVIDIA's reference
board will hopefully bring on an improved 2d picture, no
word from the manufacturer on this kind of change though.
Here you have a closer look to the
available ports on both cards. We can see those sharing
similar features, the standard VGA port and DVI output are
included while the small connector on the Ti4400 is for
TV-out and the higher-end Ti4600 model comes with a VIVO
port. According to Visiontek they chose the 9-pin to two
4-pin VIVO connector so they didn't have to sacrifice dual
monitor support or add a daughterboard which would also add
to the cost.
Both Xtasy models are what you would
usually call ‘high-end cards’, priced at $255
& $349
for the Ti4400 and the Ti4600 respectively. The main
differences between them are core and RAM speeds, as well as
the video input options the Ti4400 lacks. The more expensive
Xtasy Ti4600 comes default clocked at 300/650 versus 275/550
for the Ti4400. It would seem that the speed
difference between boards isn't enough to justify the extra
$100, but in theory, the Ti4600 board should also offer more room
for overclocking (see next page for more details).
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