NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400/4600 Roundup - April 2002

MSI G4Ti 4400-VTD (MS-8871)

Much like the V8440 we just saw, you won't find any heatsinks on anything but the GPU on MSI's 4400 board. A modified version of NVIDIA's reference GPU heatsink/fan unit is attached via hardened thermal glue and provides excellent cooling. What truly gave the MSI card the edge however was a faster spinning fan that ended up creating an annoyingly loud sound when compared to the other fans. The plus side of this was that the MSI card ended up being the coolest running GeForce4 Ti 4400 out of the entire roundup by a significant margin (you'll see the results in the performance section).

The G4Ti 4400-VTD is outfitted with only a single Sil 164 TMDS transmitter meaning that only one DVI output is offered. Unfortunately MSI does not provide a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the box so you'll have to find one on your own if you want to use nView with dual VGA outputs.

Unlike the other Ti 4400 cards in this roundup, MSI chose to outfit the G4Ti 4400-VTD with a Philips video encoder chip. This particular chip limits output resolution to 800 x 600 but does allow for video input as well as output. In order to take advantage of this MSI bundles a dongle that has four connectors on it: s-video in/out and composite in/out. Only a single s-video cable comes bundled with the card however.

In order to take advantage of the video capture features MSI bundled their card with WinProducer/WinCoder which we have covered in our recent review of ATI's All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB. As was the case with most of these cards, MSI's DVD player is a re-badged copy of WinDVD. You also get a healthy software bundle with the card at the lowest price out of all the Ti 4400s (it actually tied with the Visiontek Ti 4400).

With the G4Ti 4400-VTD MSI has put together the best balance of features (through their VIVO) and price; our biggest complaint is the lack of a DVI-to-VGA adapter which is quite useful as these cards are perfect for exploiting the benefits of nView.