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Visiontek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti4600
Author: David Pitlyuk
Date Posted: March 27th, 2002
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| Bottom Line: The card is fast, no doubt about it, but it may not exactly be cost worthy. It depends on exactly what features you need and if you want bragging rights or not. |
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Board Overview
The first thing I noticed when looking at this card is the size of it. Check out a comparison between the GeForce4 MX440 and the GeForce4 Ti4600:
In fact because of it's size we had some issues putting the video card into our motherboard because there was an audio input in the way on an Intel D850MD. I just pushed it down a little bit and the issue was solved. I remember reading over at HardOCP something about the issue and that Visiontek had moved some capacitors around in order to clear up some of the problems. I'm not 100% sure about this though as it's something I just remember reading a while ago. If anybody can clear this up I will post an update to the review.
The other thing major thing I noticed was the cool looking heatsink from NVIDIA. Visiontek chose to go with NVIDIA's heatsink rather then making and testing their own, this also ends up saving costs for the consumer because they don't need to spend any money on R&D. Under the heatsink is the 300MHz GPU which is manufactured using a 0.15 micron technology. Note that the card gets very hot.
 
In terms of memory there are 8 chips, 4 on each side of the card. Each of the chips are 2.8ns 16MB and made by Samsung. The default clock is set at 650MHz which means that this is the first consumer card to break the 10GB memory bandwidth barrier. Also note that the memory chips do not have heatsinks on them like previous generations of NVIDIA cards. The reason is because of the difference between QFP memory (GeForce2/3) and BPA (GeForce4) memory.
You will also notice this Philips SAA7108E encoder/decoder:
This chip allows the Xtasy Ti4600 to do the video-in/video-out with the VIVO cable I spoke about earlier. This brings me to my next point, the card offers the NVIDIA Personal Cinema support we talked about in our Xtasy Everything review we did a while back. Although note that the card does not work with the Personal Cinema's breakout box, which means there are no TV-Tuner capabilities. We were told that Visiontek was looking at doing an NV25 or NV17 based Xtasy Everything based on the Personal Cinema this year.
Something new that you will notice on the card is multi-monitor support, aka nView. Like ATI's Hydravision technology, nView is very similar in terms of how it is used, in fact, it's made by the same company. I personally think that nView is even easier to use then Hydravision.
If you see the back of the card here you will notice that there is a DVI-I and HD-15 connector. In order to run to monitors that use HD-15 you will need an adapter that can convert DVI-I to HD-15, it looks like this:
Just a quick note, this adapter comes with Radeon video cards...Visiontek does not include it. So if you need one you'll have to pay extra, even though they are fairly cheap.
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