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Albatron
Medusa Ti4200P Turbo
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Author : Wayne
Date : 8th November 2002
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Introduction :
Selling your graphics chips out to third party
manufacturers may make good business sense for the likes of
NVIDIA and ATi but from a user's point of view it means the
need to choose between a whole spectrum of manufacturers all
claiming to have the fastest, the most innovative, the cheapest
or just the plain best product you can buy with your money.
Those who keep themselves plugged in to the technology news
and reviews tend to know which names to trust but even so, that
trust takes time to earn and that in turn puts newer companies
at a distinct disadvantage. The fastest and best built graphics
card on the planet might be manufactured by "Crystal Lilly
Industries" but if you've never heard of them you're not
going to take any more notice of their claims than you do of
all the other claims from all the other companies you've never
heard of. So how do you sort the wheat from the chaff when it
comes to choosing one of the many cards available today? Easy!
you let sites like us do the testing and take at least some
of the guesswork, and the risk, out of handing over your hard
earned cash.
Albatron may not quite fall into the same category
as the fictional "Crystal Lilly Industries" or other
equally unknown companies but they're hardly the most established
name in the industry. In actual fact Albatron as a name didn't
make an appearance until this year (2002) but the company behind
it, Chun Yun Electronics, have been involved in the production
of wide-screen multimedia monitors, rear projection systems,
TVs, and plasma displays since 1984! That in itself may not
automatically mean they can cobble together a top quality video
card but it sure gives them lots of practice with the electronic
design and build side of the equation.
NVIDIA's Ti4600 may have lost the speed crown
to rivals ATi, albeit temporarily if the rumors prove to be
true, but it remains an incredibly powerful example of a modern
GPU. Its only real negative, for some people at least, was the
asking price. As with most flagship products of its type the
Ti4600 appealed to a relatively small portion of the market
and was more a showcase of the available technology released
to generate interest in and drive up the sales of their more
mainstream and therefor more financially rewarding cards like
the MX series GeForce4s and of course the immensely popular
Ti4200. The Ti4200 has been an incredible success story for
NVIDIA and even hardened enthusiasts soon realised that they
could save themselves some serious cash by opting for a 4200
over a 4600 and making use of its strong tendency for overclocking
to narrow the performance gap. The card I'm looking at today
has taken the GeForce4 Ti4200 and done something quite extraordinary
with it. To begin with they've built the card on the larger
and theoretically much more stable 8 layer PCB used previously
for the Ti4600 cards only. Next they've teamed the GPU up with
a full 128MB of 3.3ns BGA memory and finally they've added a
very efficient all-copper heat sink and aluminium RAM sinks
front and rear to keep things cool. Finally they've increased
the core and memory clocks from the standard 250/444 (core/memory
based on a 128MB configuration) to a not insubstantial 250/550.
They may be relative newcomers to the video card scene but it
seems they know what they want when it comes to building a very
desirable product, question is have they managed it? Let's take
a look at the Albatron Medusa Ti4200P Turbo and see how it shapes
up?
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Features:
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- Performing up to Ti 4600 specifications but remaining
at Ti 4200 prices, providing the end user with the best
performance
- Used an 8-layer PCB that is also used in the Ti 4600
chipset, which helps to improve voltage stability
- 3.3ns BGA DDR RAM is used to allow VRAM clock cycles
to exceed 550MHz.
- 128 MB DDR Memory
- nVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU
- Accuview Antialiasing
- Lightspeed Memory ArchitectureT II
- nVIDIA nifinteFX II Engine enable a virtually infinite
number of special effects that deliver the next leap
in realism to 3D graphics
- Dual programmable Vertex Shaders
- Advanced programmable Pixel Shaders
- 3D Textures
- Shadow Buffers
- 4 dual-rendering pipelines
- 8 texels per clock cycle
- Dual cube environment mapping
- High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
- AGP 4X/2X Support
- High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
- 32-bit color with 32-bit Z/stencil buffer
- Z-correct true, reflective bump mapping
- High performance 2D rendering engine
- Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
- True color hardware cursor
- Integrated hardware transform engine and lighting
engine
- Nvidia Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- MicrosoftR DirectXR 8.X and OpenGLR 1.3 Optimizations
and Support
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Unpack Checklist:
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- The following items should be contained in the package.
- The Ti Series VGA Card
- User's Manual
- CD Driver and Utilities
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Requirements of the System:
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- Before the installation the following conditions are
the required in your system.
- Computer's processor~ Intel PentiumR processor
or others compatible system
- Operating System~ WindowsR 95/98/ME, WindowsR
2000/NT display drivers
- LCD or CRT Monitor
- AGP Slot on your mainboard
- CD-ROM drive
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