Gainward GeForce4 Ti 4200: The First Retail 4200

In order to keep costs down and honestly because cooling memory doesn't help all that much there are no heatsinks on the memory. Remember that memory is much more of a capacitive device than a transistor-heavy GPU and thus doesn't produce nearly as much heat since there isn't a lot of high-speed switching going on.

The GPU sports a circular heatsink much like what we saw on Gainward's GeForce3 line of cards. Again to cut costs we don't see the same elaborate forms of cooling that we found on the Ti 4400 and 4600 cards, but then again the GPU isn't clocked nearly as high as those parts to warrant additional cooling.

The heatsink is attached to the GPU using a simple clamp and a bit of thermal grease improve thermal conductivity between the two. There is no grill covering the top of the fan which is actually a positive point in our book since a lot of times those grills can be pushed too far down and restrict the movement of the fan. The surface of the heatsink itself is flat with no fins and thus isn't the best possible cooling design. The fins around the perimeter of the fan are mostly for show and are quite flimsy, you don't want to apply too much force to them or they will bend easily.

The card features two video outputs; a single 15-pin analog VGA output and a DVI-I connector. Since the 4200 features the same nView logic as the rest of the GeForce4 line these two outputs are quite handy for enabling multimonitor setups, unfortunately Gainward does not provide a DVI-to-VGA connector for the second output. If you are fortunate enough to have one DVI display then the external Silicon Image TMDS transmitter will enable resolutions up to 1920 x 1440.

A third output is a 9-pin s-video-like connector that interfaces with Gainward's VIVO cable. The cable features a set of composite/s-video input and output cables to take advantage of the Philips SAA7108E video encoder chip on the card itself. As we mentioned in our GeForce4 roundup, the Philips encoder chip only allows TV output for resolutions up to 800 x 600 but it makes up for that limitation in its support for both video output and input. Just as is the case with Gainward's more expensive GeForce4s, the Ti 4200 comes with a copy of WinCoder and WinProducer to help take advantage of the VIVO nature of the card.