Hardware

GeForce4 TI 4200 Platinum Gamers Edition Review

July 7, 2003 9:32 pm
Sean Gibson
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The GeForce4 family of cards proved that nVidia is the major force to be dealt with in the realm of video cards. Only rivaled by ATI with their chipsets, nVidia cards do have one major benefit they play over their feature-rich competition – a variety of cards at a variety of price points to satisfy all gamers’ budgets. The engineers at XFX Graphics, one of the pioneers and leaders in nVidia board manufacturing brings us the “Platinum Gamers Edition” of their Editor’s Choice award winning product, the GeForce4 Ti4200 card.

This time around on this card, it’s on an 8X AGP PCB board, stocked with 128MB of RAM (up from 64), and has one of the coolest (both literal and figuratively) fan and heatsink solutions on the market. What does this all add up to? The best damn $199 you’ll ever spend on a video card. Why? Not only are you getting the card, you’re also getting one of their brand new PC gamepads, a VGA-DVI converter, and one of the best software game packages we’ve ever seen come with any product – titles such as Commanche 4 and Ghost Recon.

As you can see you clearly get what you pay for. With new motherboards being equipped to handle the 8X AGP form factor, there’s all the sense in the world to purchase a card that supports this feature – especially if you’re on a budget … you have to maximize your dollar if you’re a gamer – it’s our nature!

Retail Bundle

Retails packages include…

The card
DVI-I to VGA adapter
Software (Drivers & Games)
S-Video Cable
Gamepad (cool!)

There are three full version games are included which are Ghost Recon, Comanche 4 and Racing Simulation 3 – not new games but very solid titles and a great thing to simply be added for a video card package. There are also five demo games on one CD which are Ballistics, Delta Force-Black Hawk Down, IL-2 Sturmovik, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, and Vietcong. Also included are full versions of CyberLink’s PowerDVD XP and Power Director v2.1 Pro VE which can be used for video editing with the VIVO feature.

The gamepad that’s included is actually one of the new lines of “Executioner” gamepads that are going to be released by XFX in the near future. It’s a USB gamepad that features 12 buttons, 2 analog sticks, and your standard thumbpad. Games such as NHL2004 (as we found out at E3) will make gamepads such as this one (with the 2 sticks on it) mandatory to play their game. The fact that it’s included with the video card makes this one valueable bundle.

benchmarking

We used the following benchmarking utilities to the fullest:

- 3D Mark 2001 SE
- 3D Mark 2003
- Quake III (32-bit color, everything maxed out)

We decided to use the three major benchmarking utilities against the other XFX cards we’ve reviewed to see how they stacked up against each other. We expected to be able to overclock this piece of fine machinery a lot, but not to the degree we expected. We were able to get the CPU up to 294MHz, and the RAM up to 620MHz … simply amazing. This card at $199 was outperforming and out-overclocking the next model up, the Ti4400 card!

3DMark2001 SE SCORES

3DMark2001 SE is the old installment in the popular 3DMark series. By combining DirectX8.1 support with completely new graphics, it continues to provide benchmark results to make informed hardware assessments. This is probably the most popular benchmarking program out there, and for good reason. The results…

Wow a very convincing testimonial that this card is a real winner, as it just blew away the benchmarking score. The new drivers and 8X AGP really do make a difference in performance, don’t they!

3d mark 2003

The new benchmark utility is 3D Mark 2003. We ran the benchmarking tool and got this score, which in future times will be able to match up against other cards…

Nice.

Quake III Arena Demo

We’ve consistently run the Quake III demo in our review of video cards. Let’s see how the XFX Ti4600 card stacks up against the other cards…

Geforce4 Ti 4400 Results

	FPS (higher is better)
1024×768	157.6 fps
1280×1024	143.3 fps

Geforce4 Ti 4200 Platinum from XFX Results

	FPS (higher is better)
1024×768	139.6 FPS
1280×1024	119.9 FPS

So the card doesn’t outperform the higher card, but does perform quite admirably. There’s no doubt that your OpenGL games will perform very well with this card.

Conclusions

Perhaps you’re turned off by the bad publicity surrounding the new GeForceFX cards. Perhaps you just don’t have the money to spend $400 on a top flight nVidia card. Maybe you’re just looking for a little more bang for your buck because you have to maximize your dollar. You don’t just want a video card – you want a deal. So how does a top flight video card sound that comes bundled with a gamepad, a grip of great games, and all the cabling you’ll need for success? Yeah, it sounds pretty frickin’ sweet.

Big time props to the boys at XFX for this card. It’s a great way to say thanks and goodbye to the GeForce4 family of cards. This sucker popped out some amazing overclocked numbers thanks to a great chipset, a great PCB board, and one of the better cooling solutions we’ve seen on a video card in some time.

If you’re looking for a GeForce4 Ti4200 card, the XFX Platinum Gamers Edition card is absolutely, bar none, the one to buy.

The Final Word: If you want to buy a video card on a budget, or looking to get the most for your gaming dollar, this is one of the best products on the market today. Editor’s Choice – big time!