Introduction

Ever since Visiontek closed their doors, there haven't been many manufactures out there who offer graphic cards which have the same amount of oomph in terms of quality and performance as Visiontek did. Fortunately a new company in Taiwan called Albatron seems be shining light and shows some great promise for the future. Albatron isn't exactly new in its true sense, they have been around since 1984 producing wide-screen multimedia monitors, rear projection systems, TVs, and plasma displays. However in 2002 the company made a strategic change in their focus and started manufacturing PC components such as Motherboards and graphic cards.


To be on top of the market, Albatron ensures their products go under strict quality control and moreover they thrive on offering something extra than its competitors in the same price range. Within the past couple of months Albatron has gained some much deserved recognition for their impressive products. Today we bring to you one of their new offerings in the graphic cards range which they call the "Ti 4200P Turbo".

The GeForce4 Ti 4200 chipset has been around for some time now offering users an affordable alternative to the money draining GeForce4 Ti4400 and GF4 Ti 4600 based solutions. The GF4 Ti 4200 based cards are around half the price of the latter two products, but the only drawback of course is its performance. While users are able to overclock the GPU of the Ti4200 to Ti4600 levels, almost every Ti4200 based card came out with slower 4ns DDR memory as opposed to 3.3ns BGA DDR memory in the GF4 Ti4600. This memory bottleneck is in fact the main feature that differentiated these cards from each other.

Albatron has decided to change things for the betterment of the end user. It's nice to see some people thinking of the poor folk like me:) Albatron claims their GeForce4 Ti 4200P Turbo model is capable of performing as fast as a GF4 Ti 4600 card, but still offer the card in the price cap of a Ti4200. The card is made on an 8-layer PCB design similar to the Ti4600 cards and it also comes with 3.3ns BGA DDR memory, which now allows us to run the memory at 600MHz without any problems. (1000/3.3 * 2).

If the card performs similar to a GF4 Ti 4600 card, this would make the Albatron GeForce4 Ti 4200P Turbo one of the cheapest GF4 TI4600 equivalents out there in the market. Well lets see how true this claim is. I don't plan on going through the details of the GF4 technology since it's common knowledge to everyone. If interested take a look at this article of ours which covers some of these aspects.

Features

• 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

Comparison of the Geforce 4 based cards offered by Albatron