Introduction

Everyone knows that ATI's Radeon 9700 is the big boy on the block when it comes to graphics cards, but the problem is that not everyone (namely me) can afford to shell out $300+ for a video card. Nvidia's contender, the G4 Ti4600 is also up there but not only performance but price as well.  Thankfully, they also have produced a line of cards for the more price conscious of us who want performance; in comes the Ti4200. Priced at around $130 the Ti 4200 is touted to deliver some good bang for the buck and today we'll be taking a look at the ABIT Siluro to see if it really is a modestly priced performance graphics card worth our money. 

What you get

ABIT has kept with the look on their boxes, which to me is a kinda funky looking ancient world type drawing. Also on the front of the box, you can see the Nvidia logo.

That nice blue/turquoise PCB certainly stands out and looks cool. Included with the card is the installation manual, Driver CD, and TV-out cables - Composite extension, S-video extension and S-video/Composite adapter. Also included is a DVI to VGA adapter which is that little wonderful thingy that will allow you to take advantage of the nView technology for running dual displays on this card. Kudos to ABIT for this thoughtfully included thingamabob!

Card Specifications (white paper stuff)

• Nvidia GeForce4 Ti NV25 GPU w/250 MHz Core Clock speed

• 64 MB DDR w/500 MHz Memory Clock speed

• 8 GB/sec memory bandwidth

• AGP 4X

• Open GL and DirectX support

• nView technology to support dual displays

• TV-Out supports S-Video/RCA output

• DVI-I interface for LCD monitor

• HDTV/DVD playback support

You'll notice that this card only has 64MB memory, you can get the Ti4200 with 128 MB of DDR for only about $10-$15 dollars more. The difference in these 2 cards though is that while the 64MB version is running a memory bandwidth of 500MHz, the 128MB version is only at 440MHz. In other words the 64MB version is faster.  Faster for now until the fully DX9 compliant games come out that will need more RAM.