Introduction

Taking the value market by storm

While we all dream of Matrox Parhelia, NVIDIA’s NV30 GPU, or ATI’s upcoming R300, in today’s world NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Titanium rules the roost. Up until now gamers couldn’t experience the performance of the GeForce4 Ti without shelling out over $200, putting the GeForce4 out of the reach of most consumers. At least that was the case just over a month ago, but now one chip changes all of that: NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4200.

In our original GeForce4 preview, we discussed the origins of the Ti 4200. Born out of the need to fill the void between the GeForce3 Ti 500 and GeForce4 Ti 4400 (not to mention ATI’s RADEON 8500 price cuts), the GF4 Ti 4200 was originally designed to operate at 225MHz with 500MHz memory. However, the specs were later changed to 250MHz core/500MHz memory in the case of the 64MB card and 250MHz core/444MHz memory for the 128MB variant. In terms of price, 64MB Ti 4200 cards sell for roughly $30 less than 128MB boards. We highlighted the difference in performance of both Ti 4200 cards in our original Ti 4200 preview.

VisionTek’s Ti 4200 strategy

This brings us to VisionTek. As one of NVIDIA’s largest partners, it’s no surprise that VisionTek was one of the first card manufacturers to market with a GeForce4 Ti 4200 card. In their case, they chose to focus their efforts solely on the 128MB Ti 4200 with 444MHz DDR memory. For the Ti 4200, we’ve noticed that many card manufacturers are producing cards based on both variants of the Ti 4200. This gives consumers the ultimate in flexibility when shopping for a new video card: should you go with the cheaper Ti 4200 which offers a little more performance in most of today’s applications or spend a little more and get a 128MB Ti 4200 which should offer more performance headroom for the next generation of games?

For their Ti 4200 lineup, VisionTek decided to begin shipments of 128MB boards first (128MB boards like the one we’re reviewing today first shipped in May) followed by shipments of 64MB boards later this month. Based on a quick search of Price Watch, it looks like the 64MB Xtasy Ti 4200 cards should be in the $180 range while 128MB Xtasy 4200 boards are currently selling for just over $200.

So what does VisionTek have in store for their Ti 4200 card? Lets take a look and see!