A few months ago, when tricked out Ti4200s were all the rage, all the ncie ones had faster BGA memory. Now we have fancy Geforce FXs but it's gone back to the old stuff! It just seems a lot higher build quality went into the Geforce 4 Ti series than the Geforce FX. A FX5600 may be faster trhan a TI4600, but the TI4600s had large 8-layer PCBs, cool heatsinks, BGA ram, and overclocked liek crazy. The FX5600 would be a bit pricier, have a nicer GPU, lower quality PCB, and crappy slow RAM. What happened? and what should altrons new video card be ($125-$175)
But it's not as widespread. My issue is the last of the Geforce 4 Ti's were AWESOME - they had 8 layer PCBs, very fast BGA, colored PCBs, ramsnks and fancy heatsinks... I was looking at the upper midrange stuff when typing this (as that's what the ti4200 was) and it's all green PCBs with slow DDR...
It's all about the cost of production BGA, 8-layer PCB's they all cost more money. Also a lot of cards widened their bus to 256bits but slower memory. Rather than faster memory on a 128bit bus.
The XFX Geforce 4 models are faster than most other GF4 cards and come with VIVO capabilities. Original GF4 Ti 4200's 250 core / 444 memory. Now XFX models...... The XFX GF4 Ti 4200 128 MB VIVO 250 core / 513 memory. ~ £100 The XFX GF4 Ti 4200 128 MB VIVO Turbo 250 core / 620 memory. ~£125 with games and joypad. Also the XFX use better quality 8 layer boards from the Ti4400. Look to see if you can get then in the US.
It's not just XFX. All over the market there was a lot of creativity with the Ti4200... they added 8x AGP, ti4600 PCBd, BGA ram, exotice coolers (Abit OTES for example, the forerunner to FXFlow but not as loud) The fastest memory ever mad eis on the TI cards. (Gainward used 2.8ns RAM in it's Ti4600, most newer cards are around 3.5ns) Many Ti4200s could overclock to 300/600. THe gainward mentioned above hit 350/675 or something like that.
are 8-layer pcbs actually 8 layers of circuts, of just 8 layers of fiber, so it is denser than the 5 layer. I didn't think that they were were circuts.
