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NK-360 Laptop cooling pad 
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Siluro Gf4ti4200-8x OTES 
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| Multiple Defrag Programs Reviews! |
Welcome to the review of the Siluro Geforce 4 ti4200-8x OTES video card. This card is very interesting for it's OTES (outside thermal exhaust system). Unlike other cooling systems where the hot air coming through the heatsink gets expelled into the computer tower, this actually pumps the hot air generated from the GPU only out the back! It looks like a case mod in itself and is simply a piece of work.
Here is what the driver/software install menues look like:
I recieved the video card in the beginning of August 2003. Within the box is the AGP 2x compatible video card, S-video TV-out cables, a standard to DVI converter, + software: Driver disk, software album + America's AA Army Operations 1.4 FULL GAME! Quite a complete package.
I plugged it into my APG 4.0 slot and powered on the system. Installed the
drivers for the product and restarted. Immediately I tried 3dmark2003. It came
up with an error message: Display open failed.
So, I went into start-->run-->
dxdiag and ran some direct3d tests. None of them could run. I believe that the
error message said that the driver could not be initialised (failed at step 8 + AGP texture acceleration not available). Error Message code:HRESULT = 0x887602eb (error code). DirectDraw on the other hand, works fine.
So, now to figure out what went wrong. Hmmm. Well, I got a headache trying
to figure it out.
I tried reinstalling drivers (both what came with the card and detonator: 41.09
&45.23), resinstalling directx9b. reinstalling windows XP pro (refreshing
the operating system, took about an hour), and it still made no difference.
It ended up being an incompatibility with an MSI tv@nywhere MASTER TV-tuner card . I tried updating drivers did not help, neither did changing the PCI slot that it was plugged into. So, I'm returning the card, and magically directx is very healthy.
The core speed runs at 275MHZ, memory at 513MHZs. As you may know, most manufacturers of this card run the GPU at 250MHZ, but Siluro comes a tad ahead of the pack. This card is the equivalent of a Ti4400 card, for the price of a ti4200.
I was able to overclock the video card using RivaTuner, using hardware
overclocking. I successfully overclocked the video card to 310.5MHZ and the
memory to 567MHZ. It just shows you how well OTES is able to keep the GPU cool.
I was able to touch the end of the heatsink from the back of my tower and it
was not hot in the slightest even while running looped 3dmark2001SE benchmarks,
while overclocked! Although my duallie MP2k+ system normally runs in an air
conditioned environment, I'm sure if it was in my small bedroom the heatsink would get a
touch hot. Thankfully, the GPU can handle above 70 degrees celsius.
Back to overclocking: Many things interested me in the process of slowly
tweaking both the GPU and memory faster and faster. The GPU hit the limit
first, quite the opposite of what I thought. So I backed off the GPU by 10MHZ
and kept raising the memory in 5MHZ increments while running a short 3dmark2001SE
test in between. It went quite a bit higher before I saw artifacts and backed
off the speed a tad to ensure stability. Now on a previous video card of mine
(MSI GF4 mx420) the GPU was able to be overclocked considerably further than
the RAM (in terms of MHZs difference from default).
Now the Siluro Geforce 4 ti4200-8x OTES video card is not fully directx 9.0 compatible meaning that it does not have all of the capabilities of a next generation card such as the geforce fx series of video cards. But rest assured, all games will work with the card. I will be benchmarking with both 3dmark2001SE and 3dmark2003 running the video card atnormal speed and the overclocked speed mentioned above.
| 3dmark01 | 3dmark01 overclocked |
|---|---|
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| 3dmark03 | 3dmark03 overclocked |
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As you can see, this video card is a kickass product capable of enough processing power even for the hungriest of games for time to come.
An individual can purchase this product either online through various web sites easily attainable with a search engine or at a computer store such as PCCLUB
Current price=$167.75 at Pricewatch
I love it, I am very happy with my purchase. Best of all, it is affordable running at around $140 dollars. You may think that this is rather spendy, but for someone who wants to be able to turn up the rendering quality on a demanding game while having smooth frame rates, this is the card to get. If someone were to buy a radeon 9700pro on the other hand, I'd say that your spending way too much for a card that will be 'old' in about 1.5years. With my experience with ATI Radeon product drivers, I would say to stay away from them and stick with nvidia.
This product
