X-bit labs

eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 with ACS3 Cooling System

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 01/16/2003 | 12:00 AM ]

Today we will review a very interesting and unusual product, which stands out among other NVIDIAGeForce4 Ti4600 based cards. I am talking about eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600. This solution boastsexcellent quality, TV-input and output, good performance in games, a solid software bundle.But the most exciting thing is certainly the 3rd generation Asymmetric Cooling System (ACS3).

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Overclocking
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusion
  

eVGA company is one of the most well-known American graphics cards makers. Cards from eVGA can hardly be called inexpensive, but they won popularity due to their high quality. Besides "standard" graphics cards that follow the NVIDIA's reference-design (eVGA only makes cards basing on GPUs from NVIDIA), the company regularly stirs the community by launching some extraordinary products, intended not for everyone.

The unique peculiarity of graphics cards from eVGA is the unusual cooling system the company calls ACS - Asymmetric Cooling System. This idea has evolved to its third generation now. The ACS3 is installed in new "exclusive" graphics cards from eVGA based on the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 GPU.

We got into our test lab a specimen of the graphics card from eVGA featuring the ACS3. Of course, we put off all other work and sat down to examining the card and its features…

Closer Look

e-GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB ACS3 graphics card from eVGA comes in a large box resembling the design of the VisionTek boxes:

Inside we found the graphics card, an adapter from the composite TV-Out/TV-In connector to two S-Video and two RCA connectors, a user's manual, stickers for the system case, CDs with drivers and utilities, NVDVD and CyberLink PowerDirector Pro v.1.2 ME software bundles and tech demos from NVIDIA and, at last, a nice-looking envelope to store all this stuff in. By the way, among the utilities there is Automated Driver Management from eVGA itself. It facilitates driver installation process and controls the availability of GART driver, which is a part of the chipset driver set.

The contents of the box did impress us. However, all the pleasant emotions we aroused by the company's attention to minor details are nothing compared to what we felt when we saw the graphics card:

   

It's not a graphics card. It's a monster! The eVGA company made a card with such a cooling system that could make ABIT engineers with their sensational OTES (see our ABIT OTES Review) green with envy.

Let's see how this "brontosaur" works.

The card follows NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti4600 reference-design and carries the standard set of connectors: VGA, DVI and TV-In/TV-Out:

The front face of the card is covered by a 1mm-thick aluminum plate with a hole for the fan:

At the snapshot of the card from the side of the AGP connector, we can see that the plate is fastened with screws to the GPU cooler and to the aluminum posts in the right part of the card. On its left side, the plate holds onto a curve on the bracket with connectors:

Let's dismantle the system. Under the plate we find the standard NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 design and, of course, the components of the cooling system: the cooler covering the graphics core and heatsinks on the graphics memory chips:

The cooler on the graphics core is the heart of the Asymmetric Cooling System of the third generation. The cooler follows its name: it is asymmetric. The fan sits not right on the graphics core, as usual, but a little bit to the side. The airflow comes from one side, is directed by the fan along the ribs of the heatsink and is blown out at the opposite side:

There is a copper foot right where the heatsink is pressed to the chip (copper has twice as good heat conduction as aluminum). The foot has solid base on the chip's side and ribs on the other side. The base of this foot has a special tiny groove in the very middle, where a thermal diode should fit. Our card didn't have a thermal diode or any other hardware monitoring options, so these functions should then appear in future graphics card models from eVGA:

The graphics memory chips situated on the front face of the card are equipped with heatsinks. They are cooled by the air coming from the graphics chip cooler:

Besides the air from the chip cooler, the additional heat dissipation is also improved due to close contact with the plate covering the front side of the card. You can see in the snapshot below that they used a layer of thick thermal paste to ensure better thermal contact:

The paste layer is about half a millimeter thick, so we have doubts about good heat-conductivity of this construction. On the other hand, memory chips don't generate too much heat so such cooling should be quite enough. The heatsinks, judging by their unassuming look, were cast from aluminum and didn't undergo any further processing. Fortunately, their exterior doesn't matter here, as the plate on the front side of the card hides them completely.

The engineers didn't forget about the memory chips at the bottom of the card as well. Sometimes it's real fun to see a graphics card with memory chips boasting "cool" and solid-looking heatsinks only on the front face of the card, while those located at the bottom of the card have no special cooling. Why install the heatsinks at all, then? To increase card's overclockability or secure reliable work under "heavy" thermal conditions? Most often it seems like they are made for aesthetic purposes only.

By the card from eVGA, the graphics memory chips at the bottom of the PCB are properly covered with a heatsink. It's made of the same aluminum alloy, just like the heatsink of the graphics chip. The construction of this passive cooler includes a plate and ribbed heatsinks soldered to it in the spots where the graphics memory chips should be pressed to the plate from beneath:

There are special resilient thermal pads between the memory chips and the heatsink, which are similar to very soft rubber by touch. On the opposite side of the heatsink, there is another resilient microporous rubber pad, which is pressed against the card to ensure proper contact between the heatsink and the memory chips:

So, we see that the cooling system in the graphics card from eVGA is made not for beauty, but for real work. The manufacturer did his best to design effective cooling of the graphics core as well as graphics memory on the both sides of the card.

Before going over to benchmarks, let's dwell upon the electronic components of the card.

Its heart is an NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 GPU working at 300MHz frequency:

The card has 128MB of graphics memory onboard in chips from Samsung with 2.8ns access time:

The graphics memory works at 650MHz (325MHz DDR).

The card supports TV-In and TV-Out by means of a SAA7108E chip from Philips, which is often found in cards based on NVIDIA graphics solutions:

The last thing we would like to point out is the noise level of the ACS3. The plate covering the front side of the card tells that the fan has about 4,100rpm speed. It's really noisy. Among all the cards we have tested, only ABIT card with the OTES cooling system can be considered noisier than the eVGA monster. But in our subjective opinion, the eVGA baby manages to "out-scream" OTES even.

So, what would you sacrifice the silence for? The answer is obvious: for increased overclockability and reliable work of the card in the "heaviest" thermal conditions.

Let's see whether this is the case…

Overclocking

Graphics cards based on the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 GPU don't show high overclocking potential, like GeForce4 Ti4200 based ones.

This is quite understandable. The GeForce4 Ti4600 and Ti4200 are actually built on the same chip and their only difference lies with the working frequencies. They all undergo manufacturer's tests to prove their ability to work stably at certain frequencies. Thus, those chips that can work at 300MHz get the Ti4600 marking. It means that chips are sorted out by the frequency during manufacturing process, that is, they are overclocked by the manufacturer. At the same time, the top frequency depends on the chip's architecture, manufacturing technology and so on, and it's about the same for the both GPUs. Moreover, the Ti4600 is closer to the top limit than the Ti4200. So, the overclocking potential of the Ti4600 is lower than that of the Ti4200.

It's all a little different with the graphics memory as different cards have chips with different access time. But all the Ti4600 based cards carry 2.8ns chips from Samsung onboard, which can't boast any record-breaking overclockability, either.

Why did I start all this talk? We mean that you shouldn't be surprised at the low overclocking potential of the eVGA card. The maximum frequencies the card worked stably at were 330MHz chip and 714MHz (357MHz DDR) graphics memory. That's really moderate: the frequency growth of the GPU and memory was only 10%. For example, the GeForce4 Ti4600 based graphics card from VisionTek featuring a standard cooling system worked at 315MHz and 750MHz (375MHz DDR) respectively. It's graphics core overclocked less than the core in the eVGA's card, but the memory got much faster, although there were no heatsinks to cool it down.

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed configuration looked as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU;
• ASUS SR7-8X (SiS648) mainboard;
• 2 x 256MB PC2700 CL2.5 DDR SDRAM by Crucial;
• Fujitsu MPF3153AH HDD.

We used the following software:

• Ver.6.13.10.6218 driver (Catalyst 2.5) for Windows XP for an ATI RADEON 9500 PRO based graphics card;
• Detonator 41.09 driver for Windows XP for the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB ACS3 graphics card;
• Windows XP;
• DirectX8.1;
• Quake3 Arena v. 1.30;
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2107.

We used the following settings for our benchmarks:

Quake3 Arena:

32bit screen and textures color depth. Maximum graphics quality settings. Tri-linear filtering and texture compression enabled.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter:

We ran the tests in Quality mode: 32bit screen color depth. "Quality" graphics quality settings.

Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2107:

We tested with the following settings: Texture Detail: Highest, World Detail: Highest, Character Detail: Highest, Physics Detail: Normal, Character Shadows: ON, Dynamic Lighting: ON, Detail Textures: ON, Projectors: ON, Decals: ON, Coronas: ON, Decal Stay: Normal, Foliage: ON, Trilinear Filtering: ON.

As a competitor to the card from eVGA, we chose an ATI RADEON 9500 PRO based card with 128MB of graphics memory. It's based on the graphics chip from the new ATI family, which is close to the GeForce4 Ti4600 in performance (see our article called ATI RADEON 9500, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9700 vs. NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and GeForce4 Ti4600).

Performance

The eVGA card easily leaves ATI RADEON 9500 PRO behind in Quake3 Arena even without overclocking. The overclocking adds about 10% to the results of the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600. That is, the results growth was the same as the graphics chip and graphics memory frequency growth: 10%.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter uses anisotropic filtering, so ATI RADEON 9500 PRO based card outperformed even the overclocked eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600. It happened because RADEON performs anisotropic filtering with a much lower performance loss than the GeForce4 (see our ATI RADEON 9700 Pro Graphics Card Review).

But the card from eVGA regains the lead in Unreal Tournament 2003. The overclocking still provides about 10% performance growth.

Graphics chips from ATI work perfectly well with enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing (see our article called ATI RADEON 9500, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9700 vs. NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 and GeForce4 Ti4600), so the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 card has no chances here. Overclocking increases the card's performance, but it still cannot catch up with the Sapphire RADEON 9500 PRO.

We see the same picture in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. The RADEON 9500 PRO is out of reach for the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600.

Unreal Tournament once again confirms that the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 is checkmated when working with full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

Conclusion

Overall, the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 graphics card is an interesting and unusual product, which stands out among other NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 based cards. The excellent manufacturing quality, TV-input and output, good performance in games, a solid software bundle - all these things can draw attention to the new card from eVGA.

But the new card, as well as any other GeForce4 Ti4600 based card, has got a strong rival: ATI RADEON 9500 PRO graphics chip. While in most "normal" modes the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 outperforms the RADEON 9500 PRO, it loses to the ATI solution when full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled.

The new generation of the Asymmetric Cooling System from eVGA deserves a separate word. Regrettably, this system seems to be "out of time" and "out of place" right now.

What do we mean? Firstly, if the ACS3 had appeared earlier, before the introduction of the new graphics solutions from ATI, that is, when NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 based cards were indisputable performance leaders, then the card with such a well-done cooling system would have got a lot of attention. But by this time, there have already appeared ATI RADEON 9700 PRO based graphics cards as well as ATI RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9700 based solutions, which are immediate rivals to GeForce4 Ti4600.

Secondly, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 based graphics cards are known to have a scarce overclocking potential, so the installation of this cooling system brings just a very small increase in the overclockability. If a system like ACS3 were installed onto GeForce4 Ti4200 based cards, which have a much higher overclocking potential, this would be more rewarding and overclocking fans would be simply crying for joy :).

So, the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4200 with the ACS3 will become an excellent choice for those who don't like standard, uniformed graphics cards, who have a transparent system case, who want to make a gift to a friend-gamer or those who just don't stand the word "ATI". :)