NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400/4600 Roundup - April 2002

Final Words

With the GeForce4 NVIDIA truly has a winner and that makes the jobs of the card manufacturers much easier. Without a single card currently available that can touch the performance of either of the solutions featured here today, if you want the best of the best the choices are right here in front of you.

If you flip back a few pages to our summary tables you'll realize that we didn't pick our roundup winners based on overclocking stats, temperatures or performance. In the end, the cards with the coolest running temperatures didn't overclock any better and the cards with the highest overclocks didn't have the most robust cooling setups either. The reason behind this being that the hardware was truly the limiting factor, especially in the case of the GPUs. Since all the memory is sourced from the same manufacturer (Samsung), the overclocking characteristics are really identical across the entire line of GeForce4 cards at this point. In fact, this comparison gives us a better idea of how the Samsung BGA memory chips overclock as its a larger sample size than we've taken in any individual memory comparison before.

The primary deciding factors for issuing our Editor's Choice awards here were price/availability and features/bundle. Because the two are generally mutually exclusive unless you obtain a good balance we made recommendations on best value and best overall package as well.

As the best overall GeForce4 Ti 4400 card, our Editor's Choice Silver award goes to MSI for the G4Ti 4400-TVD. MSI would have won the gold had they included a DVI-to-VGA adapter but other than that oversight the card is as good as it gets when it comes to Ti 4400 solutions.

As the most feature-filled GeForce4 Ti 4600 card, our Editor's Choice Gold award goes to Gainward for the GeForce4 Ultra/750XP. It's the only card that offers dual DVI outputs as well as such a healthy feature-set. However we would like to see Gainward drop their confusing naming scheme as their products are strong enough to stand on their own without confusing marketing being thrown in there.

Coming away with our Editor's Choice silver award for the best GeForce4 Ti 4600 is PNY with their card. If you don't care about the features that the Gainward card offers then the PNY is approximately the same cost as the Chaintech but without the incubating heatsinks and you get much wider spread availability.

There you have it, if you're in the market for a GeForce4 Ti 4400 or Ti 4600 you should have everything you need to make an educated buying decision. Next up on the list, a roundup of the highly anticipated GeForce4 Ti 4200 cards as soon as they're available. Stay tuned.