Overclocking and System Setup

Overclocking

The GeForce4 Ti 4200 has been known to reach core frequencies in excess of 300MHz, so NVIDIA’s decision to ship reference boards at 250MHz seems mighty conservative. Thankfully, third-party manufacturers will have some freedom to adjust those settings for more aggressive performance. Further, many of the Ti 4200 cards equipped with 3.6ns memory modules have approached the 600MHz mark.

At 500MHz, the 4ns Samsung modules on the reference design were already operating at their rated capacity. Even still, the card performed stably all the way up to 300/570MHz, indicating that the low-end NV28 boards will probably enjoy the same popularity as the current Ti 4200 with the overclocking community.

The NV18 proved even more flexible. At default speeds, the MX 440 with AGP 8x runs at 275/500MHz. With a quick adjustment of NVIDIA’s built-in overclocking utility, the card ran without a hitch at speeds up to 312/580MHz. This isn’t really a surprise, considering four 3.6ns Samsung memory modules reside on the board.

AGP 8x connector up top, AGP 4x on bottom

Test Bed

Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz

ASUS P4S8X SiS 648 Motherboard

512MB Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 Memory

NVIDIA NV28 GeForce4 Ti 4200 Reference Design 128MB
NVIDIA NV18 GeForce4 MX 440 Reference Design 64MB
ABIT GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB
PNY Verto GeForce4 MX 440 64MB
Detonator Driver 40.71

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA-100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh

All power saving options were turned off, as were the Automatic Update and System Restore services. Graphics options under the ‘Performance’ tab were all disabled for maximum performance.

Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.31 – ‘four’ demo
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter – Beyond3D Maximum quality script, 32-bit color, Grand Cathedral demo
Jedi Knight II ‘jk2ffa’ demo
Comanche 4