MSI Ti4600 versus Gainward Ti4400

VGA Reviews by jmke @ 2002-05-13

Back in January 2002 I started testing and reviewing videocards that were kindly "donated" by Comtechnology. With the purpose to create one big, massive comparative review. However due to website coding, public relations and real life stuff I was running abit behind schedule.

I hope you will find something interesting in this article. The info I collected is posted, together with benchmarks and a whole collection of pictures.

Introduction

Introduction:

All videocards used in these benchmarks and reviews were kindly "donated" by ! Comtechnology! , I would like to thank them for being so kind to lend me these fine pieces of hardware

Test systems:

- Epox 8KHA+
- XP1600+ @ 1785Mhz
- 256Mb Corsair PC2400 RAM

Only SpecViewPerf bench was run on:
- Asus P4T-E
- Pentium 4 1.6@2.0Ghz
- 128Mb Apacer RDRAM

Gainward Ti4400

The Gainward comes in a flashy box sporting the statement: "Golden Sample"
This leads to believe that this videocard is pretty high quality, and overclocking should be a success. Let"s hope so...

(click to zoom)
Contents of Box

In the box you will find these items:
Madshrimps (c)

- The Videocard (duh!)
- An extensive user manual
- CD with drivers and overclocking/tweaking utilities
- CD with InterVideo Software
- CD with the game Serious Sam
- CD with WinDVD player
- A DVI-to-VGA Adapter
- Splittor to VIVO
- a "Powered by Gainward" Casebadge(click here to see)

The Card

The front and back of the card in a nice color , click to zoom

While I was placing the card I noticed it was alot bigger then the previous nvidia cards. So I decided to compare them

Here you see the card lying under a GF3 Ti500 you notice that the GF4 is longer and higher!
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Top to bottom, GF4 Ti4400 , GF3 Ti500, GF2 Ultra
Overclocking

The DDR ram on the Gainward is Samsung 3.6ns, which corresponds to 550Mhz total.
If you install all the utilities provided by Gainward, you get to chose a normal and enhanced mode. In normal the card works at 275/550, enchanced overclocks the card to 280/580. This gives a very slight boost in performance

3DMark2001 Default Bench 1024x768 32bit:
- Normal: 10877
- Enhanced: 10925

Quake 3 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail demo2:
- Normal: 126
- Enhanced: 131

Jedi Knight II 1600x1200 32bit MAX detail:
- Normal: 81
- Enhanced: 83

This improvement is not noticeable in games. So I decided to see how far I could push this card. Without any extra cooling & in a closed case enviroment I got the card stable at 310/610.Core speed is more then Ti4600 default (320), memory speed would do better if extra cooling was applied, but I was aiming for average working situation.

Not gaming related

While testing this card I was very pleased with the 2D quality in Windows. Playing DVD"s was a joy. But I didn"t stop there.
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a DVI-to-VGA converter connected at the back I connected a second screen and after one reboot I was enjoying full dualscreen pleasures! Madshrimps (c)

watching movies and surfing the net becomes a reality

MSI GF4 Ti4600

MSI GF4 Ti4600:

Contents of Box
Madshrimps (c)

- a very good user manual
- 9 cd-roms with software
- MSI DVD player
- drivers and utilities
- InterVideo WinCoder/WinProducer
- InterVideo WinCoder/WinProducer SP
- Sacrifice game (full)
- AquaNox game (full)
- No One Lives Forever (full)
- MSI Games Collection: 7 demos of the latest games
- S-Video extender
- S-Video-to-RCA adapter

I didn"t find a DVI-to-VGA converter however, so I had to use my own to test the Dualscreen function, which worked exactly the same as with the Ti4400.

The Card Madshrimps (c)

The card has a flashy see-through cooler but no ram sinks
Other than that all pretty standard, although most Ti4600 cards come with dual DVI connectors at the back.
The TV-Out/Video-In connections makes this card more then just "for gaming". I wasn"t able to test these functions so I wont make any judgements on them, hopefully in the future I get the right material together to perform all the necessary tests.

Overclocking

The memory chips are also produced by Samsung this time with a 2.8 ns access time which corresponds to 357 (714) MHz. The card works at 325 (650) MHz.
On first boot into windows, I checked the speeds, and no matter how many reinstalls, I ended up with a core of 300 and memory running at 660! Mhz (10Mhz higher then default). No clue why, but a little bit of free speed for the non-overclockers.
As with the Gainward, I didn"t use extra cooling. I ended up with a core at 320Mhz and memory at 680Mhz. This gave a good boost over default performance, but ain"t very spectacular.

BenchMarks and Conclusion

BenchMarks and Conclusion:

Cards at default speeds:

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Cards overclocked to max stable speeds:

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Conclusion

2 very fast videocards. If you are into videoediting and want extreme performance you have not much choice, MSI it is. But if you don't care about the extra's, it is hard to go wrong with the Ti4400 from Gainward, which performs very closely to the MSI Ti4600! at a considerably lower price!

My choice: Gainward Ti4400. But with the Ti4200 around the corner it would not be so wise to go out and buy a videocard NOW. Reports of Ti4200 overclocking to Ti4600 speeds are not rare, so holding on to your EURO's and $$ for a little longer might be wise.