In the continuation of our budget gamer series that I started with the Soltek SL-75FRN-L nForce2 Motherboard, today we’re going to look at the video card side of things. The XFX Platinum Gamer's Edition GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo AGP 8x 128MB DDR with VIVO & DVI card is one heck of a mouthful, but that’s not always a bad thing in this business. In this case, you are not getting the bottom of the barrel Ti4200, but the newer AGP 8x version along with S-Video In/Out and a DVI-out for digital flat panels. XFX is a division of Pine Technologies and are a relative newcomer to the market, although Pine Technoloy has been at it since 1989. They decided to stick with NVIDIA GPUs for their line of cards, which currently extends from the lowly TNT series for the close-to-no-budget gamers, all the way up to the soon-to-be GeForce 5800s (no Ultras expected).
The Ti4200 series has been one of the biggest sellers in NVIDIA’s history, and there’s reason why. It has one of the best price-to-performance ratios and tweakers are able to do many things with it, including some very decent overclocking. That is what XFX had in mind with this card, with the larger-than-average heatsink, and placing the components on an eight-layer PCB for better shielding, a rarity on this model. We’ll see how far we can push it later as I’m sure that’s on the top of most of your minds.
So what exactly is a budget gamer anyway? In the terms that Envy News uses, it’s a person that upgrades their computer peripherals about every two years, and usually not all at once. The budget gamer spends a bit more on their hardware than joe consumer, as they need the muscle to run their favorite games. They don’t buy hardware on the basis that it will benchmark faster than the competition, they just want their favorite games to run well, and games that are far off on the horizon take a seat on the back-burner when considering a purchase.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s see what you get in the “total package” of the XFX, and it’s no small package!