Overclockers Australia - X-Micro Impact T4600 (GeForce4 Ti4600) Video Card

X-Micro Impact T4600 (GeForce4 Ti4600) Video Card - Page 2
09-May-02 - Review by James "Agg" Rolfe

In the Box:

For a cheaper card X-Micro's bundle is surprisingly large. 3 cables are included, being a splitter cable for TV-Out (one connector for S-Video, one for RCA composite and, curiously, another S-Video plug marked "Video-IN" - more on that in a minute), an RCA extension lead to make connecting to your TV easier and a female-female S-Video to RCA converter. The card also comes with 4 CD's: one containing WinDVD, a driver CD, a "bundle version" of the game Serious Sam and an unmarked CD I suspect is only for reviewers, as it contains 3DMark2001SE, PCMark and the latest DetonatorXP drivers etc. You might not get that last CD in the normal retail pack. A plain but decent manual and a little metal case-sticker saying "3D Powered by X-Micro" round out the bundle.

One thing that's not included is a DVI-SVGA adapter. I can't understand why any Ti4600 vendor would leave this out. If one were included, you could plug two monitors into the card and enjoy the dual-monitor features I explored on the last page of the Asus review. Support for it is already in the chipset and the drivers. Surely it would cost manufacturers like X-Micro at most a couple of bucks to include this little gadget and then they could write "DUAL MONITOR SUPPORT!" on the box. I don't have an adapter here, but I tested the Asus-included one on a Sparkle Ti4600 that passed through here a little while ago and it worked fine - so I've no reason to believe it won't work on all the Ti4600's.

Video-In?
As mentioned earlier, the Video-OUT cable has an extra connector, marked Video-IN:

click to enlarge

I haven't looked at too many Ti4600 reviews, but it seems to me that video capture capability would set this apart at least from the higher-priced Asus. A quick search of the X-Micro's PCB reveals the Philips SAA7108E, which Philips Semiconductor describe as a new multi-standard video decoder and encoder chip, offering high quality video input and TV output processing as required by PC-99 specifications. It enables hardware manufacturers to implement versatile video functions on a significantly reduced printed-circuit board area at very competitive costs. A quick Google reveals that this chip is used on a huge range of cards with video-capture ability. However, there's no mention of any video capture capability on the box, X-Micro's website or the manual. None of the included CD's have any kind of video capture software and, when I installed Video Studio 5 (which was packaged with another video card here), it politely informed me that no capture drivers were found. Googling for capture drivers for the Philips chip didn't lead anywhere interesting.

click to enlarge

So overall, a bit of a wild goose chase. Perhaps the "encoding/decoding" features of the Philips chip are entirely restricted to TV-Out functionality - this seems unlikely. Perhaps there is a capture feature, but it's not implemented on the T4600 - the rumour from Altech is that the T4400 will include some capture software - and maybe X-Micro just include the same splitter cable with every model. Or maybe there is some mysterious way for a more savvy user than myself to unlock the video-capture abilities of this card. At the moment it seems that the Video-IN cable is simply a red herring. If you can prove me wrong let me know and I'll update the review.

Update: Ah-ha! Thanks to Andrew, Simon and Mark who suggest that the required file is nVidia's WDM Capture driver. Apparently the version to have is 1.11 but nVidia only have 1.08 on their page. Googling reveals this page which has a link to the v1.11 file on Gainward's FTP site. Curiously, the install also finds TV-Tuner devices and installs drivers for them, but of course there's no TV-Tuner hardware on this card, even if the logic is buried away in a chip onboard somewhere. Anyway, using CapTV, a freeware tv-tuner and video-capturing program, I was able to prove that the card does indeed have a Video-IN capability! Here's an exciting video featuring a testbed PC, my hand, my mouse and a jar of screws:

nikon.avi - 2.5MB
(requires Intel Indeo video codec)

Quality of that file is much lower than you can get with this card. That file was shot using my Nikon CP990 digicam's video out feature - it's not intended to be a proper video camera. I captured the file at 640x480 @ 15fps then compressed it to 50% quality using Intel Indeo 5 in VirtualDub, another freeware video-editing/capturing program. Note that the filesize is only a 2.5 MB and you'll realise how compressed it is. Using the WDM Capture driver there's full hue/saturation/contrast/brightness adjustment etc and I quite happily captured at 50fps for a while - resulting in a 500mb file in no time. So, this is quite an impressive add-on feature despite it seeming almost an afterthought.

So anyway, let's move on to the stuff you're really interested in..

Next Page - Performance, Overclocking and Conclusions