Abit GeForce4 Ti4200-8x OTES
Abit stunned the world when they announced the unique GeForce4
Ti4200 OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) cooling system; they said it
would keep the GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU substantially cooler then all the other GF4
coolers out there. Though, it would have been nice to see Abit go all the
way and include some form of memory cooling as well, since the Samsung 3.6ns
TSOP-II memory runs hotter than BGA DRAM.
| Abit GeForce4 Ti4200-8x OTES
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The Abit GF4 Ti4200-8x OTES is a very big, and heavy
videocard. It is also the only card in this roundup that takes up not just the
AGP slot, but also the first PCI slot as well. The OTES cooler uses a heat
pipe to draw heat away from the GPU to a small field of soldered on
copper fins. When working as designed, the OTES cooler should enjoy the larger
cooling surface area over that of the stock heatsink. An integrated squirrel
cage fan blows air from inside the case, over the copper fins, and then out of
the entire case via the PCI slot. It all looks mighty impressive, and nVidia have even demo'd the next
generation GeForceFX with a variation on ABIT's OTES.
Generally speaking, our fancy video cards can never really run cool
enough, and this can't be more true then when it comes to overclocking. We had some pretty
high expectations for the ABit card in terms of overclocking, and with the core already clocked
at 275 MHz (25 MHz above stock speeds) we began to increase
the speed. The GeForce Ti4200 GPU reached 290MHz, 295MHz and 300MHz without
any problems.
 At a core
speed of 305 MHz however, the Abit card would lock up while running the
nature demo in 3DMark2001SE which usually means too high a core
speed.
After we lowered the core speed to
304 MHz, the Abit Ti4200 OTES could pass every test we threw at
it.
The memory on this card is by default is clocked at 500 MHz so we were gentle
when it came to overclocking. Anything speeds higher then 599 MHz and the Artifact Tester
would start registering artifacts. They were not visible, but once the program
found some, we stopped overclocking the memory and hung our hats
up.
It's not surprising that the memory was only able to reach
599MHz, most Ti4200's do not tend to get much past 600 MHz. Our expectations
for a core overclock were a
little higher than the 305MHz we were able to eek out of the Abit
OTES, especially with such an elaborate GPU cooler. I guess that just goes to show you overclocking
videocards sometimes just comes down to the pick of the litter.
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