Albatron Ti4280P VGA DVI-I & TV-out
Albatron are a fairly new addition to the PC hardware world. Although previously focusing on producing TVs and monitor displays, they've become a hardware player since Jack Ko, co-founder of industry giant Gigabyte, decided to ply his skills in a new venture. Already recipients of Intel's direct support status, Albatron have been busy manufacturing a number of motherboards and graphics cards in recent months. This is a perfect opportunity to see how far they've progressed. We've got 2 Albatron cards to put through our benchmarking run. First is the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 8x AGP.
Taking the sub-name of the Greek Gorgon, the box is suitably impressive. Albatron must use the same graphics designers as most other manufacturers.
The card arrives in, dare I say, Gigabyte's traditional PCB colour. ABIT have also been known to use this deep blue colour. No overt attempts at cooling here. What we have is a reasonable standard heatsink assembly with the RAM modules left bare. It appears as if Albatron aim to produce a value-based card.
Like the majority of cards that we can actually get a peek at, the RAM is provided by Samsung in 8 x 16MB TSOP modules. - 4 on each side. Rated at 3.6ns, or 555MHz, Albatron, like most others, are being a little conservative in rating it to operate at 500MHz (standard 128MB Ti 4200 RAM speed). There's a little more to this as we'll find out later, an extra 13MHz or so.
Video encoding is taken care of Philips, again. The SAA7104E serves as the chip of choice. Although it's not able to decode incoming video, it can output to resolutions of up to 1280x1024 (like the SAA7108AE) in both NTSC and PAL formats. It's also HDTV compliant, although that's not much use to most users.
With no video-in facility, the Albatron Ti 4280 ships with a simple S-Video-to-RCA converter. Both connections are maximised with extension cables. The S-Video extension plugs directly into the back of the card whilst the RCA connection requires the basic converter. WinDVD is included, but sadly it's only version 3.1 with 2-channel support. I had hoped for version 4 or better. Bundled games included Serious Sam (original) and Motocross Mania - a little weak. The driver CD includes the VIVO WDM drivers (1.17), overclocking tools, Detonator drivers up to 31.40, and DirectX 8.1. The manual is quite well written, though.
