Specifications

Since you’re probably already pretty familiar with the specs of the GeForce4 GPU, we’ll briefly go over the features before getting into more detail on the board itself.

The list

NVIDIA® GeForce 4 Ti 4600 GPU
128MB high speed DDR video memory with 10.4 GB/sec bandwidth
4.8 billion AA samples/sec fill-rate, 86 million triangles/sec
1.23 trillion operations/second
On-board TV-out support up to 1024x768 resolution
LCD output support up to 1600x1200
NVIDIA video processing engine (VPE)
High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
nView display technology for powering multiple displays
Integrated 350MHz RAMDAC, resolution up to 2048x1536 (VGA output), True Color @ 60Hz
Accuview antialiasing subsystem
Full acceleration for Microsoft DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 ICD
3-port IEEE PCI 1394 card included
Software bundle: EXPERTool performance tuning utility, Serious Sam: The First Encounter, WinDVD, Intervideo Winproducer and Wincoder

First impressions

The Ultra/750 XP dons a red printed circuit board, separating itself from other GeForce4 offerings on the market. The board design itself closely follows NVIDIA’s reference design, Gainward simply adds heatsinks to the memory chips and dual DVI outputs instead of the single DVI/VGA connector combination included with every other GeForce4 card on the market. While LCD prices have come down considerably over the past few years, CRTs continue to offer better display performance as well as price. Therefore, we personally don’t see the need for dual DVI outputs, as LCD gaming isn’t quite feasible just yet. If you don’t have an LCD display, don’t fret. Gainward includes two DVI-to-VGA converters in the Ultra/750 XP’s packaging.

The heatsinks on the memory modules may come slightly in handy for overclockers, as we were able to overclock the memory on our Ultra 750/XP to levels higher than any other GeForce4 card we’ve seen previously.

Other than those two changes, the Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP is unchanged from the GeForce4 Ti 4600 board. For video-editing buffs, Gainward includes Philips MPEG chip for encoding/decoding video. With NVIDIA’s VIVO adapter included in the packaging, the Ultra/750 XP supports this capability through the S-Video output.

One additional feature Gainward includes with the Ultra/750 XP is a PCI Firewire card. With the aforementioned video input/output capabilities of this card, this makes the Ultra/750 XP the perfect card for the hardware enthusiast that is new to the video-editing scene.