NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400/4600 Roundup - April 2002

Chaintech GeForce4 Ti 4600

By far the shiniest card in the roundup, Chaintech put gold accents on virtually every piece of metal on their Ti 4600. The GPU heatsink, the memory heatsinks, even the DVI and VGA connectors look like Mr. T should be wearing them. It's quickly proven that function should take precedence over form as the shiny elements end up providing the worst cooling out of the batch. As you'll find out later on, this doesn't necessarily mean the poorest overclocking potential but we should make it clear that making your heatsinks look like gold doesn't actually improve anything either.

The only DVI output is driven by the sole Sil 164 transmitter and Chaintech graciously provides a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the box. Chaintech makes the second card we've seen thus far in the roundup with a Philips video encoder chip. The chip allows both video output and input; although Chaintech provides the proper dongle to accept an s-video input they don't provide any video capture software to take advantage of it.

The Chaintech software bundle would have been improved tremendously with software to take advantage of the card's VIVO capabilities but its absence helps result in an extremely low price.