The Boards

Three of a kind

Each of the Titanium models from Leadtek has received the MyVIVO enhancement to them, boasting a TV output resolution of 1024x768. Other than the obvious VIVO ASIC, Leadtek has done a bang-up job of making sure that their cards are absolutely cooled. The heatsinks are practically laid out without going over the edge or doing something that would have prohibited the use of the PCI slot adjacent to the AGP slot.

Leadtek WinFast A250 LE TD

The top-of-the-line

The first picture is a snapshot of Leadtek’s new GeForce4 Ti4200, which is slightly smaller than the 4400 and 4600. The picture on the right is the 4600 but we only took a picture of it and not the 4400 because both look the same. Keep in mind that all three cards featured here are identical except for the speed of their core and memory, which are:

Ti4600: 300MHz Core / 650MHz Memory
Ti4400: 275MHz Core / 550MHz Memory
Ti4200: 250MHz Core / 444MHz Memory


Performance in fill rate and vertices are pretty similar across the board. All cards perform in the upper end of the spectrum and at that level there won’t be too many differences. However, all is not the same when talking about memory bandwidth. This is where the Ti4600 shows its authority with the fastest DDR memory available. At its default setting, the Ti4600 is able to push a theoretical memory bandwidth rate of 10.4GB/sec. On the other end of the scale, the Ti4200 is only capable of doing roughly 70% of what a Ti4600 is capable of doing, at 7.1GB/sec.

The BGA VIVO chip tucked tightly underneath the heatsink

Wires that accompany each card

The question however, is whether the reduced bandwidth actually affects bandwidth in a significant way. Obviously we’ll be seeing slower performance with a Ti4200 than a Ti4600 but if the differences are negligible, the only question of which board to purchase becomes easily determined by price.

VIVO’ing around

Strangely when we were testing with the boards, we were not able to get the boards to work properly with video-in. Vide-out worked fabulously but it wasn’t so for input. We tried it with different drivers from both Leadtek and NVIDIA and even tried on different OSes but to no avail. We eventually gave up and contacted Leadtek technical support and although they were helpful we just couldn’t get the drivers working. Strangely, an error always appeared saying that the drivers couldn’t detect a video-in capture device. Perhaps this is a driver issue or a BIOS issue with the card but Leadtek assured us that shipping cards would not have any issues and from our experience, Leadtek cards are stellar cards in every case.