Asus V9280/TD GF4 Ti4200 8x

What you get

I've said it before and I'll say it again..."First impressions mean a great deal", which is why you don't see store shelves lined with plain brown boxes. The psychological impact of packaging is definitely not lost with Asus. Not only is the box itself bigger than most of the boxes I've seen, but the color scheme is definitely 'eye-catching' if you know what I mean.

   

Bundled with the card we have a wide assortment of goodies. Not only does Asus include the manual, TV-out cable and driver disks, but a Media Showcase CD, a CD labeled "VR Aquarium" but also five different games:

• Morrowind

• Black Thorn

• Worms Blast

• Battle Realms

• IL2 Stumovik

And of course we can't forget that great little do-dad, the DVI to VGA converter for us poor folks who wish to run dual displays. Let me take a moment to make a comment here......the manual sucks. Plain and simple, the thing is 112 pages long and gives you absolutely no information about the card itself. Trying to cram 14 languages into a single manual Asus has sacrificed quantity for quality here.

The card itself

Moving onto the video card, we see that this is one bright colored card with golden yellow PCB. The most appealing detail here has got to be the heatsink. The heatsink gives the card an extremely aggressive looking profile. With the cooling fins arrayed in a circular curved pattern it looks ready to rip into anything you throw at it.

   

Further enhancing the look of the heatsink and card is the Asus logo in the center. By using the reflecting surface it catches the light as well as your eye.

Next we move to the memory chips. Here you can see that Asus is using Samsung standard sized 4ns memory chips. Four chips are arrayed in the standard pattern on the card. They have also gone with the Phillips SAA7104E chip for the video encoding.

 

A quickie shot of the back of the card shows the normal layout with the VGA port on the left, TV-Out in the center and DVI to the right.

Now we have seen all the pretty pictures and oohed and ahhed over 'em. How does the thing perform is the real question, right? I guess it's time to find out. Using the following benchmarks we'll use our BFG Asylum GF4 Ti4200 as a base comparison. Then we get to the good part.....OVERCLOCKING!!! How well will this card handle having the screws put to it? We'll find out.

• 3D Mark 2001SE

• 3D Mark 2003

• UT 2003 using [H]ard|OCP's benching program

• Quake 3

Test System

• Chaintech Summit 7NIF2

• AMD Athlon XP 2000+

• 512 MB Corsair PC3200

• Maxtor 20GB HDD

• Acer 52x CD-Rom

• Windows XP Pro

• nVidia Detonator Drivers v43.45

• Lian-Li PC7323

 

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