Gainward Geforce 4 ti 4200@ 300/546 is that a good overclock speed?

[Intelman07]

Well is it? What has most people got out of these golden samples?

 

[Intelman07]

?

 

[AnAndAustin]

I'm afraid you've discovered the hard way that Gainward's 'Golden Sample' badge on GF4TI cards is pretty much completely meaningless unlike the truly golden GF3TI200 days. Gainward use the same RAM and cooling solutions as 98% of the 4200 cards and as such you get nothing better from them than any other card but you do pay extra for the 'Golden Sample' sticker. That said 300/550 is average for 4200-128MB cards and beats stock 4400 perf, it is a very nice boost, but if Gainward had stuck 3.6ns RAM on there it would have only added $4ish to the price tag and the o/c would then be 300/600+ ... that's what 'Golden Sample' should mean. Take a look at Abit's OTES 4200 cards, again that is what 'Golden Sample' should mean, but for Gainwards GF4 line it has about as muchmeaning as 'GF4' in the GF4MX range of cards!

The worst thing about Gainward is their very mis-leading naming, eg. 'GF4 PowerPack Ultra 650 TV GS' for their GF4MX440 (LOL), 'GF3 PowerPack TI 450 Golden Sample' for their GF3TI200 64MB and finally 'GF2 TI 450' for their GF2PRO (now that is blatently mis-leading). Don't get me wrong, Gainward are a much trusted and reliable manu and back in the GF3 days they were leaders in both o/c'ing and image quality, these things have now vanished for GF4 cards and only the price discrepency remains

 

[Intelman07]

Oh darn!! Oh well its still a nice card! That 3.6ns ram idea would be cool if they did so. It would almost be like buying a Ti4600 for less! Do you think my card will be able to play Doom 3?

 

[AnAndAustin]

DoomIII is meant to be more demanding than UT2003 esp on cards with 'only (LOL) 64MB gfx RAM. However this is likely to be for full details and a 64MB card like 4200-64, Rad8500, Rad9000PRO and GF3 should all run it well with a little tweaking of the detail sliders. An Athlon 1.4ghz with one of these sub-$100 cards can play UT2003 pretty nice, I'd expect a 128MB version of one of these cards to still play DoomIII well esp with a faster CPU which really are cheap to buy now. At worst most people with 'mid-range' kit should find they get very playable FPS at 800x600x32 with no eye candy which won't be too bad at all to tide us over until the new hw becomes available.

So for your P4 1.6ghz (have you tried o/c'ing?) and any GF4TI4200-128MB should play DoomIII well with maximum details at 1024x768x32 and maybe even with 2xAA! Lets face it, unless we can muster up $350+ or else wait patiently that's about as good as we are likely to get LOL!