Abit Siluro Ti4200 Otes

Abit's new graphics card uses the Nvidia Ti4200 chip.

That may sound a little strange in these days of DirectX 9, Radeon 9700 and Nvidia's new chip, the NV30, but there's method in Abit's apparent madness.

This is a Ti4200 card with the claimed performance of a Ti4600, yet it costs roughly £100 less.

The secret lies in a technology called Otes, developed by Abit.

Otes (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) is a patent-pending technology that uses the cooling mechanism from a notebook processor on the Ti4200 chip.

This additional cooling allows Abit to run the chip at 275MHz rather than the standard 250MHz.

The exhaust port for the Otes system is next to the DVI output. The VGA output is above the DVI, and a TV-out is next to that.

As a result, the backplate of the Abit card is double height, so you can't use the first PCI slot on your PC as it is blanked off.

Gainward achieves a similar end to the Siluro Otes by using 128MB of faster graphics memory than is called for by the Nvidia reference design.

We tested the two cards back to back. The Siluro Otes costs £147 inc VAT online compared to the Gainward Ultra 650 128MB at £170 inc VAT.

We tested both on a 2GHz Pentium 4 processor with 256MB of RD-Ram and Detonator 40.41 drivers.

The Ti4200 Otes was marginally faster than the Gainward in our 3Dmark tests, and a near dead heat in Jedi Knight.

Although the scores don't match a 4600, they clearly make the Abit Siluro Ti4200 Otes a better value-for-money proposition.

A word of caution though: the Otes system uses a 7,200rpm fan and it is relatively loud for a graphics card.

SPECS

• Core 275MHz, 256MB DDR GPU
• Dual 350MHz Ramdacs
• 64MB DDR SD-Ram working at 550MHz
• 8Gbps memory bandwidth
• VGA, DVI
• S-Video outputs
• DirectX 8.1
• Open GL
• AGP 2x and 4x compatible

£146.87 (£125 ex VAT)

Contact: Abit 01438 228 888
www.abit.com.tw