NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400/4600 Roundup - April 2002

eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti 4600

Every card has a story and this one has a very unique one. The first thing you'll notice about the card is that it features an extremely unique cooling system that eVGA likes to call their Asymmetric Cooling System or ACS for short. The cooling setup is made using two aluminum blocks with grooves cut out of them (one for the front of the card and one for the back). The grooves are then filled with copper piping heatpipes that contain water, these copper pipes are run across the parts of the aluminum heatsink that cover the eight memory chips. The memory chips themselves are attached to the heatsink using thermal tape while the GPU makes contact using thermal grease as usual.

The 5000 RPM fan is noticeably louder than any of the fans on the other Ti 4600 cards but surprisingly enough this elaborate cooling solution doesn't offer any additional overclocking headroom nor any significant cooling improvements. In fact the ACS is more of a novelty feature that results in more noise coming from your system than with any of these other cards. Luckily eVGA offers a similar card but without the ACS for $50 less which ends up being what is sold everywhere online. The problem you run into is that very few of the online vendors differentiate between the ACS equipped card and the card that uses the stock heatsink/fan. Your best bet is to go for the stock version which can be found through most vendors for about the same price as the Chaintech Ti 4600.

There is no DVI-to-VGA adapter included in the retail packaging meaning that the nView support is useless if you have two analog displays and no DVI-to-VGA adapter lying around.

Much like what we saw with Chaintech, eVGA uses the Philips video encoder chip that is capable of video capture operation however they don't include any video capture software; not only that but we don't even get a cable to provide us with the ability to take advantage of the video capture functionality.