The Box

Okay, so maybe nobody cares much about the box apart from me but just like most women seem to be able to judge how good a restaurant is by taking a peep at the toilets, I like to thinks you can glean quite a bit of info about a company by the box they ship their products in. It's not quite a science but it does usually hold out and when you're gaced with a Great Wall of China of multicoloured boxes at your local retailer it's the small things that can tease your cash out of your wallet.

MSI's box is big, bold and bright without being tacky and you get an immediate feel for their experience in the retail market. In addition to being reassuringly weighty thanks to the mass of CDs inside, it also bristles with information about the product and what comes with it. I do think these futuristic space craft and android type images on the box fronts are becoming a little old hat these days but there's still a very large (and not unsurprisingly very young) sector of the market who still like this kind of thing.

Despite the sheer volume of information on the box rear it doesn't look too cluttered and it features just about everything from press and partner awards to key features.

First impressions can score big inside the box too and my first impressions of the Ti4800SE were very positive. The PCB is of course MSI's trademark red affair which immediately promotes it a notch over dull old green. The cooling arrangement is another eye catcher and shows just how much effort MSI put into the design of this card.

	Click For Larger Image
	Click For Larger Image

The cooler is almost revolutionary, in fact if it weren't for ABIT's OTES this would be one of the first radical cooler rethinks for a while. Not that being radical makes it any good necessarily, I just happen to think it has a better chance of cooling the GPU than the reference design would.

With a bit of Photoshop trickery we can take a look at precisely where the GPU sits in relation to the cooler's fins and for once we don't have it sat right beneath the heat producing fan motor and its associated dead zone, we instead have just over half of it sat beneath the fan blades and therefore benefiting for a direct air stream and the remainder below the folded copper fins. Eureka! This design could actually be quite effective!

Although to be properly effective it needs to be transferring all that heat into the cooler's copper base plate and this means thermal grease. With the cooler removed there's good news, MSI have applied thermal grease to the GPU and to each of the four RAM chips, though to avoid things getting messy they've applied only a very small amount to the memory. For the ultimate performance you might want to clean off the generic silicone based grease and apply a little of your own, but you'll probably need to use a fairly viscous formula and add a good 1mm thick layer of it for reasons I'll discuss in a second.

On the rear of the card MSI have gone with a large heat plate type design that makes contact with the four memory chips and also contacts the board behind the GPU too (arrowed red). I rather like the idea of a heat plate on the back of the card, not only because it helps balance up temperatures between the actively cooled front and passively cooled rear but also because it lets the more extreme amongst you to epoxy some monster heat sinks to it, or perhaps add a fan or two, who knows? The idea's good....but MSI don't quite pull it off.

And the reason they fail to get my full plaudits is down to that little insulating pad arrowed in green. This pad, assuming it should actually be there and hasn't just been forgotten at the factory, lifts that corner of the plate slightly and though it still contacts the GPU and every memory chip it actually doesn't sit flat and true. Look below and you'll see a chink of light between the top of the memory chip and the cooling plate along at least half its surface area. This is why I suggested using a viscous TIM and reapplying it yourself and this accounts for the unusual spread patterns . And just to keep the situation balanced the same problem is evident on the front of the card but to a lesser degree.

Under that nifty cooler sat a week 42, 2002 revision A1 GPU. The surface of these GPUs is considered far enough out of whack as to be worth lapping by some of the more enthusiastic individuals amonst us but we'll be using it as-is.

Video CODEC

The video CODEC that MSI chose handle the video side of things is the Philips SAA7108 which can work at up to 800 x 600 resolution and outputs PAL (50 Hz) or NTSC (60 Hz) video signals. The 7108 offers full VIVO (Video In Video Out) functions and not just TV out.

For the truly geeky here's the nitty gritty on the Philips chip:

Video decoder

• Six analog inputs, internal analog source selectors, e.g. 6 x CVBS or (2 x Y/C and 2 x CVBS) or (1 x Y/C and 4 x CVBS)
  
• Two analog preprocessing channels in differential CMOS style for best S/N-performance
  
• Fully programmable static gain or Automatic Gain Control (AGC) for the selected CVBS or Y/C channel
  
• Switchable white peak control
  
• Two built-in analog anti-aliasing filters
  
• Two 9-bit video CMOS Analog-To-Digital Converters (ADCs), digitized CVBS or Y/C signals are available on the IPD (Image Port Data) port under I²C-bus control
  
• On-chip clock generator
  
• Line-locked system clock frequencies
  
• Digital PLL for horizontal sync processing and clock generation, horizontal and vertical sync detection
  
• Requires only one crystal (either 24.576 MHz or 32.11 MHz) for all standards
  Automatic detection of 50 and 60 Hz field frequency, and automatic switching between PAL and NTSC standards
  
• Luminance and chrominance signal processing for PAL BGHI, PAL N, combination PAL N, PAL M, NTSC M, NTSC-Japan, NTSC N, NTSC 4.43 and SECAM
  
• User programmable luminance peaking or aperture correction
  
• Cross-colour reduction for NTSC by chrominance comb filtering
  
• PAL delay line for correcting PAL phase errors
  
• Brightness Contrast Saturation (BCS) and hue control on-chip
  
• Two multi functional real-time output pins controlled by I²C-bus
  
• Multi-standard VBI data slicer decoding World Standard Teletext (WST), North-American Broadcast Text System (NABTS), Closed Caption (CC), Wide Screen Signalling (WSS), Video Programming System (VPS), Vertical Interval Time Code (VITC) variants (EBU/SMPTE) etc.
  
• Standard ITU 656 Y-CB-CR 4:2:2 format (8-bit) on IPD output bus
  
• Enhanced ITU 656 output format on IPD output bus containing:
  active video
  raw CVBS data for INTERCAST applications (27 MHz data rate)
  decoded VBI data
  
• Detection of copy protected input signals according to the macrovision standard. Can be used to prevent unauthorized recording of pay-TV or video tape signals.

Video scaler

• Both up and downscaling
  
• Conversion to square pixel format
  
• NTSC to 288 lines (video phone)
  
• Phase accuracy better than 1 /64 pixel or line, horizontally or vertically
  
• Independent scaling definitions for odd and even fields
  
• Anti-alias filter for horizontal scaling
  
• Provides output asv
  scaled active video
  raw CVBS data for INTERCAST, WAVE-PHORE, POPCON applications or general VBI data decoding (27 MHz or sample rate converted)
  
• Local video output for Y-CB-CR 4:2:2 format (VMI, VIP, ZV).

Video encoder

• Digital PAL/NTSC encoder with integrated high quality scaler and anti-flicker filter for TV output from a PC
  
• 27 MHz crystal-stable subcarrier generation
  
• Maximum graphics pixel clock 45 MHz at double edged clocking, synthesized on-chip or from external source
  
• Up to 800 x 600 graphics data at 60 Hz or 50 Hz with programmable underscan range
  
• Three Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs) at 27 MHz sample rate for CVBS (BLUE, CB), VBS (GREEN, CVBS) and C (RED, CR) (signals in parenthesis are optional); all at 10-bit resolution
  
• Selectable cross-colour reduction to improve CVBS output
  
• Non-interlaced CB-Y-CR or RGB input at maximum 4:4:4 sampling
  
• Downscaling from 1:1 to 1:2 and up to 20 pct. upscaling
  
• Optional interlaced CB-Y-CR input Digital Versatile Disk (DVD)
  
• Optional non-interlaced RGB output to drive second VGA monitor (bypass mode, maximum 45 MHz)
  
• 3 x 256 bytes RGB Look-Up Table (LUT)
  
• Support for hardware cursor
  
• Programmable border colour of underscan area
  
• On-chip 27 MHz crystal oscillator (3rd-harmonic or fundamental 27 MHz crystal)
  
• Encoder can be master or slave
  
• Programmable horizontal and vertical input synchronization phase
  
• Programmable horizontal sync output phase
  
• Internal Colour Bar Generator (CBG)
  
• Optional support of various VBI data insertion as
  WST-625, WSS, VPS
  WST-525, NABTS
  Closed Caption, Copy Generation Management System (CGMS)
  
• Macrovision Pay-per-View copy protection system rev. 7.01 and rev. 6.1 as option; this applies to SAA7108E only. The device is protected by USA patent numbers 4631603, 4577216 and 4819098 and other intellectual property rights. Use of the Macrovision anti-copy process in the device is licensed for non-commercial home use only. Reverse engineering or disassembly is prohibited. Please contact your nearest Philips Semiconductors sales office for more information.

Common features

• 5 V tolerant digital I/O ports
  
• I²C-bus controlled (full read-back ability by an external controller, bit rate up to 400 kbits/s)
  
• Versatile power-save modes
  
• Boundary scan test circuit complies with the vIEEE Std. 1149.b1-1994v (separate ID codes for decoder and encoder)
  
• Monolithic CMOS 3.3 V device
  
• BGA156 package
  
• Moisture Sensitive Level (MSL): e3.
  

Bundle

Performance