Gainward GeForce4 Ti 4200: The First Retail 4200

Overclocking

We cautioned users about expecting realistic overclocking numbers from the NVIDIA reference Ti 4200 and thus we didn't publish overclocked numbers using that card in our roundup; but now with a retail card in our hands we're able to give you what you've all wanted.

If you look back at our summary tables from the GeForce4 Roundup there are a few points of importance to keep in mind:

- On average, you could overclock the core of a Ti 4400 by 10.9%
- On average, you could overclock the memory of a Ti 4400 by 20%
- On average, you could overclock the core of a Ti 4600 by 5.2%
- On average, you could overclock the memory of a Ti 4600 by 12.3%

As you'd expect, the higher the GPU/memory are clocked by default, the less headroom there is to exploit through overclocking. Thus you'd expect Ti 4200 cards to have the greatest headroom but don't get any dillusions of being able to overclock a 4200 to 4600 speeds, at least when it comes to memory.

Without enough cards to get averages of overclocked speeds we can only provide you an indication of how this one card overclocks, remember that from our roundup of 4400/4600 cards most of the cards managed to overclock within the following margins:

- All Ti 4400 GPUs overclocked within 10% of one another
- All Ti 4400 memories overclocked within 6% of one another
- All Ti 4600 GPUs overclocked within 10% of one another
- All Ti 4600 memories overclocked within 3% of one another

Given that the changes in PCB don't effect things too much, you should be able to expect a similar distribution out of Ti 4200 cards. Our particular Ti 4200 managed to overclock from the stock 250/444MHz clock to 330/540MHz, an improvement of 32% and 21.6% in core/memory clock speed respectively. Considering that we just pointed out the relationship between overclocking headroom and default clock speeds, these promising numbers make a lot of sense.

In order to compare the various overclocked settings we took the most ambitious Ti 4400/4600 cards from our roundup and included them at overclocked settings in the performance section.