Preview: NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200

By Lars Weinand - Editor In Chief RIVA Station / Editor Tom´s Hardware Guide

Finally, all nay-sayers and doubters can be silenced: NVIDIA is definitely going to produce the Ti4200, and moreover, we can expect to see retail cards on the shelves by the end of April! The six-layer board of the Ti4200 looks very different from that of its siblings Ti4400 and Ti4600. Instead of using a long PCB with its impressive array of power supply components and transformers, the Ti4200 chip will reside on a shorter board with many fewer components. At a glance, one might even mistake it for a GeForce3 board.

The clock speeds quoted in our GeForce4 launch article are no longer up-to-date. NVIDIA will run the model we are testing here, the $199 128MB version, which will sell for $199, at a core speed of 250MHz and a memory speed of 222MHz (444MHz DDR). The 128Bit DDR SDRAM modules feature an access time of 4ns, which seems a bit low for the specified frequencies. Perhaps NVIDIA will change these specifications, though. The 64MB versions will run at a higher memory speed (250MHz, or 500MHZ DDR) and will cost only $179. At this point, no other details are available regarding this board, for example, whether the RAM will also use the new BGA format, like the other Ti models, or if there might also be an SDRAM version.

	GeForce4 Ti4600	GeForce4 Ti4400	GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB	GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB	GeForce3 Ti500
Chip Clock	300 MHz	275 MHz	250 MHz	250 MHz	240 MHz
Memory Clock (DDR)	650 MHz	550 MHz	444 MHz	500 MHz	500 MHz
Amount of Memory	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB	64 MB	64 MB
Memory Bandwidth	10,400 MB/s	8,800 MB/s	7,100 MB/s	8,000 MB/s	8,000 MB/s
Theoretical Fill Rate	1,200 Mpixel/s	1,100 Mpixel/s	1000 Mpixel/s	1000 Mpixel/s	960 Mpixel/s
Price	$399	$299	$199	$179	$299

Aside from the lower clock speeds and the changed layout, there are no differences between the Ti4200 and the other Ti models. This makes the 4200 a full-fledged GeForce4 Ti, including full multi-monitor support (two integrated RAMDACs) and the trademark dual vertex shaders of the GeForce4 Ti.

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