Although with significant differences, one could say that GeForce4 Ti4200 cards are based on very similar hardware than most Ti4600 cards (our overclocking target). The first difference you will notice when looking at both cards is that Ti 4200’s are much smaller; being a slower product, most manufacturers save on production costs by reducing the power circuit significantly. This card actually has a power circuit more comparable to that of the GeForce3 than the GeForce4 Ti4600. The memory used is also slower to reduce costs; this is actually what makes the “high-end” cards so expensive since memory accounts for much of their total cost.
Exact specs among Ti4200’s can vary, you will probably find memory in the 3.5-4ns range from most of the Taiwanese manufacturers, and if you paid a little extra for your card perhaps 3,3ns memory. You divide 1000 by the nanosecond rating of your memory, in the case of 4ns memory this is the same as 250 MHz, or, if you prefer, 500 MHz DDR which happens to be the clock speed NVIDIA has officially set for the Ti4200.
Just for your reference the Ti4400 usually uses 3,6ns memory and the Ti4600 2,8ns memory.
If we are to compare the similarities between the cards we can take a look at the GPU, these are just the same on all Ti boards, the only thing that will differ is in the text printed on top of them, but it’s really the same chip. As you might be aware the Ti4200 is clocked at 250 MHz for the core while the Ti4600 is clocked at 300 MHz, as you might guess this leaves quite a lot of headroom for overclocking.
The card I will be using for this modification is Gainward’s GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB variant (not their “gold model”.) I paid $150 for this card here in Sweden.
