NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 Roundup - June 2002

64MB vs. 128MB - Overclocking

The main difference between the two types of cards we tested was that the 64MB cards used 3.6ns DDR SDRAM while the 128MB cards used higher-density but lower clocked 4ns DDR SDRAM.

Just by looking at the ratings on the chips you can already tell that the 4ns chips are theoretically capable of hitting 250MHz while the 3.6ns devices should be able to reach 277MHz. Remembering that memory ratings aren't absolute guarantees, the 4ns chips are probably borderline for validation at 250MHz and thus they are clocked at 222MHz.

The current memory supplier most board manufacturers are using for their 64MB cards seems to be Hynix, while Samsung is providing the 16MB devices for the 128MB boards (8 devices per board).

Hynix's 3.6ns 8MB chip

Samsung's 4ns 16MB chip

Because there were only five cards in this roundup we didn't have a large enough sample size to make any sort of general conclusions about how far you can expect these cards to overclock. Things were further complicated when we received conflicting results with one outlying case of an extremely overclockable 128MB cards. In the end we can only make a good guess as to how the two types of memory will overclock based on the limited results we have.

Memory Overclocking Comparison
Card	Highest Stable Memory Overclock
ABIT Siluro GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB)	600MHz
Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/650XP (128MB)	540MHz
Inno3D Tornado GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB)	610MHz
Prolink PixelView Ti 4200 (128MB)	550MHz
Visiontek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4200 (128MB)	600MHz

If we exclude the Visiontek Ti 4200 you can see that the two 128MB cards managed to get memory overclocks to 540MHz and 550MHz, while the two 64MB cards could hit 600 and 610MHz. This is what we would expect since the 64MB cards have memory that runs about 10% faster than the 128MB cards.

The Visiontek is a notable outlier (and thus a wrench in our theory) since their 128MB card could hit 600MHz.

In the end our conclusions are this:

1) 64MB cards do have more headroom than 128MB cards (how much depends on the luck of the draw)
2) 128MB cards can be overclocked to at least 64MB speeds

Although the conclusions are based on a relatively small sample set, we're still pretty confident in them based on what we know about the memory speeds and what we've seen.