Introduction
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You can't always get what you want in life. If you could, everyone would simply opt for the best, highest specification, performance-orientated objects. There is only one small problem with this utopian world, namely money. Money defines what we can and cannot materially have. That's why almost every base product in the PC world usually arrives in differing flavours that are differentiated by the price tag attached to it. It's common to have one architecture, sold at varying prices, prices based on slightly differing levels of performance. CPUs are a prime example of this as Intel's current flagship desktop processor, the 2.53GHz P4, commands more than double the asking price of their 2.26Ghz part. Basic economics will tell you that the real money-spinner is not the premium part, but the part that appeals to the largest percentage of people. The situation in the graphics card industry is hardly any different. NVIDIA, the Californian graphics card company, have played the speed-grading game for some time now. Earlier this year we saw the release of the Geforce4 Ti series of graphics cards. Somewhat strangely, the first card out-of-the-blocks was the premium, and therefore fastest card, the Ti 4600, with operating frequencies of 300MHz core / 650MHz memory. Soon followed the slightly slower, yet otherwise identical, Ti 4400, with frequencies of 275MHz core / 550Mhz memory respectively. Although both of these cards comfortably surpassed the benchmarks laid down by previous cards, they came at a substantial price, usually the wrong side of £200 for the Ti 4400 and the wrong side of £300 for the Ti 4600. Recently, we saw the addition of the Ti 4200, the baby of the powerful Geforce4 Ti clan. This card will naturally appeal to a large cross-section of the buying public due its considerably lower street price and similar basic features as its family members. It's of little wonder that brand-name manufacturers were keen to ship their versions of the Ti 4200 as soon as possible. This card could be the real money-spinner of the bunch. ABIT are perhaps known to the majority of you as the manufacturers of performance-biased motherboards, that would be my initial outlook on them, too. However, they have a prominent range of graphics cards marketed under the moniker of Siluro. Just having a look back through records shows that ABIT have been producing graphics cards based on NVIDIA's GPUs for some considerable time. You know what the Ti 4200 is, why it's here, let's now see what ABIT's interpretation is like.
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