Making Themselves Heard: 11 GeForce4 Ti4400 and Ti4600 Cards

Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP

As usual, Gainward is advertising its GeForce4 Ti series with its high frequencies, dubbed as "Fast Clock." For its "Golden Sample" line of cards, Gainward guarantees an especially high overclocking potential. Unfortunately, this once again turned out to be nothing more than simple software overclocking through the EXPERTool display utility. In the current v2.84 revision of the tool, a message pops up upon activation and warns the user about instability that can occur when the card is overclocked. For this reason all tests were run with the standard clockspeeds as defined in the card's BIOS. Gainward's top of the line model, the Ultra/750 XP, doesn't use faster memory chips than the competition. Consequently, it doesn't offer more overclocking headroom than its competitors, either. Visually, the card follows the typical Gainward style and comes in the company's trademark red. The GPU fan is remarkably quiet, which is primarily due to the fact that it runs at a reduced voltage of only 8.6V.

Memory Cooler

From a feature perspective, no other board can hold a light to the Ultra/750XP. It comes bundled with the following: two DVI-I connectors (and the corresponding DVI-VGA adapters); TV-in and TV-out; 3D shutter glasses; and, as a bonus, a separate IEEE 1394 (Firewire) PCI card with two 1.8m IEEE 1394 cables. Two adapter cables, one for composite video or and one for S-Video, offer connectivity to a VCR and/or a TV.

3D Stereo Shutter Glasses

The software bundle isn't bad either, consisting of InterVideo's WinDVD, WinProducer / WinCoder, and the driver CD. A short quick-start guide offers installation tips. The only thing we missed out here in the THG Europe labs were instructions on the use of the 3D glasses, which currently only work with English-language versions of Windows, due to an error in NVIDIA's drivers. Lastly, the slightly aged game Serious Sam offers some entertainment.

PCI IEEE 1394 Firewire Card