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Review unit provided by Altech Computers, a distributor with offices in Brisbane and Sydney.
Time sweeps ever forwards and with it, it seems, so does NVIDIA's domination of the desktop 3D graphics market. Their dual strategies of regular product releases and partnerships with many manufacturers have ensured that once again the world's eyes are turned to cards based on their latest chipset. In this case, it's the GeForce4 Titanium 4600, or GF4 Ti4600 for short. Asus are a major manufacturer of motherboards and videocards etc and today we'll be looking at their GF4 Ti4600 offering, the V8640 Ultra.
As with most nVIDIA-based cards these days, this one follows the reference design closely. Fair enough, there's not a lot that needs changing in the reference designs and this can be seen in the sheer number of manufacturers who stick to it for their own products. At first glance it looks as if Asus have only changed the PCB colour and slapped on a fancy cooler, but according to their literature the card also features "Immersion Gold Coating" for enhanced reliability and circuit connections. It's difficult to quantify exactly what that contributes, but we'll see how the card fares for stability and overclocking later. Also I'm not sure if this gold coating is one we can see - certainly the card has a lot of small gold connections, SMD solder points etc dotted all over it, but so does the Sparkle Ti4600 I have here. Maybe it's under the purple coating of the card because, despite Asus's info page saying this gold coating is "enhancing the look of the card", I can't see much difference between the Asus and the Sparkle side by side apart from the colour. Still, I'll agree it does look very nice, with the dark purple PCB and the chrome cooler. The cooler is billed as a "copper fan sink" even though it looks like aluminium and the card doesn't seem to weigh any more than the Sparkle.. but enough about the cosmetic side of things.
The card boasts 128MB of 650MHz DDR memory from Samsung, in the new BGA packaging. Each of these tiny chips, at only 12mm square, is 16MB. This means the RAM is only a tiny part of the total area of the board. BGA chips run cooler and at higher frequencies than traditional DRAM packaging.
Layout-wise it's pretty much spot-on the reference design as mentioned earlier and this of course includes an array of capacitors at the end of the card. Ti4600's are longer than most cards we've seen for a while - tall components can cause a problem in the area past the end of the AGP slot. As seen recently on Hard|OCP the blame in this instance lays pretty squarely with the motherboard manufacturer if there is a conflict there. Most boards will be fine, but some notable exeptions are the Epox EP-8KHA series and Soltek's SL-75DRV4 and DRV5. On the Soltek boards there are floppy and IDE headers near that location so they do not directly foul the card, but cables once inserted can make installation of a Ti4600 or Ti4400 card awkward (but certainly not impossible.) We'll cover that in more detail in our upcoming SL-75DRV5 review anyway.
Asus have elected to include TV-Out and a DVI port for connecting flat-panel monitors. There is another version, the Deluxe, that includes a video-IN port also, but this Ultra card is aimed more at the normal desktop gaming market so video-IN is not included. TV-Out is, though, and is a nice inclusion that lets you watch DVD's or play games on a TV or even a projection system for those with big toy budgets.
In the box:
In the box you get a load of stuff, as we're used to from Asus. "Asus-DVD 2000" is obviously DVD playing software, there's a CD of drivers/documentation and a 3-CD pack of 7 games. Actually, the 3-CD pack wasn't provided with this card, but I suspect that's just because it's an early sample because the bundle is mentioned on the box. The one in the photo above (aqua, at right) is from their MX440 card but it's the same as mentioned on the box so it should be included. However, they do say "game bundle may differ" also. Anyway, I don't know how much people care about the game bundle - Aquanox, MidnightGT/Rage Rally and demo versions of 5 other games wouldn't affect my purchasing decision very much either way.
The box also contains a TV-out cable with S-Video and Composite connectors, a DVI-SVGA adapter (for dual-monitor use, more on that later) and a quick install guide.
