Introduction

The need for speed

Now that we know that NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4200 is the fastest graphics core in the sub-$200 market, we figured it was time to try our hand at overclocking this little gem. After all, who can turn down a free performance improvement? With this in mind we cranked the core clock speed up first, followed by the memory -- early on we were shooting for Ti 4400 levels, but held out hope for Ti 4600 results. Boy were we pumped when we were able to overclock our core to 285MHz, that’s just 15MHz shy of the Ti 4600!

Fortunately, the four nanosecond Hynix RAM on our 64MB Ti 4200 board was just as eager to overclock. We were able to get 600MHz out of our memory with no problems. Any settings higher would either result in visual tearing (in 3DMark 2001 SE) or instability (in Quake 3 while running with AA enabled). Our Hercules 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE utilizes the same RAM as our Ti 4200 reference board, however the lot number on our GeForce4 board was higher, therefore it’s possible that the newer batches of Hynix memory overclock better. This is often the case with semiconductor manufacturing, as time goes on the manufacturing process improves. As a result, yields increase, lowering production costs for the manufacturer and often gamers like us benefit from more substantial overclocking gains.

In any case, we were more than happy with our results. We’d just overclocked our $179 Ti 4200 board to higher levels than a stock GeForce4 Ti 4400!

System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz

ABIT TH7II-RAID

256MB PC800 RDRAM

ATI RADEON 7500
ATI RADEON 8500 64MB
Driver version 7.67

Hercules 3D FDX Prophet 8500LE
Driver version 7.65

VisionTek Xtasy Ti 4600
VisionTek Xtasy Ti 4400
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 reference board -- 64MB
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 reference board -- (285 core/600MHz memory)
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 reference board
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board
GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB -- (250 core/444MHz memory)
Driver version Detonator 28.32

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 8.1

Desktop Resolution: 1024x768x32

Benchmarks

3DMark 2001 Second Edition - 32-bit color, 32-bit textures
Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter - Normal (32-bit) The Elephant Atrium demo
Castle Wolfenstein MP Test - no compressed textures, (32-bit)
Comanche benchmark demo – High quality, 32-bit