NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400/4600 Roundup - April 2002

ASUS V8440/TD GeForce4 Ti 4400

With the V8440 ASUS illustrates the desire for function over form and thus you won't find a single heatsink on any of the eight Samsung DDR SDRAM chips on the card. In fact, any of these cards compared here today can be run without heatsinks on the memory just fine and there are a few manufacturers that set out to prove just that. The GPU however, is a different story; the oddly decorated circular heatsink has a layer of thermal grease between it and the GPU itself which we've found to be very helpful in cooling these GeForce4 cores. While the GPU ran a few degrees warmer than any of the other 4400 cards in the roundup, the memory temperatures were on par with both the ABIT and Visiontek 4400 cards.

The V8440 is outfitted with only a single Sil 164 TMDS transmitter meaning that only one DVI output is offered. Instead of providing a simple DVI-to-VGA adapter, ASUS bundled a strange thing: a DVI-to-DVI/VGA cable. We found it strange because ASUS could have just as easily offered a simply DVI-to-VGA adapter like they do with their Ti 4600 card.

The Conexant video encoder chip is identical to the one featured in the Xbox and supports desktop output resolutions of up to 1024 x 768. ASUS provides a s-video to component adapter cable so you can use the s-video TV out port with either type of cable, but they fail to provide either cable in the box itself.

ASUS has more of a software bundle than most competitors but it also results in a price increase over the rest of the contenders.