Abit's Siluro GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB

Abit is perhaps better known for its high-performance motherboards than its line of graphics cards, but they're been making Siluros for years now. You won't find a version of SoftMenu III tailored for graphics cards with the Siluro 64MB, but Abit has assembled quite a complete product nonetheless.

Included in our comparison is Abit's 64MB card, which unlike Abit's motherboards, actually comes with a colored PCB.

The Siluro looks good in silver and blue, but it's bound to clash with any Abit motherboard that you might have installed in your case. Like all the other cards in this comparison, the Siluro 64MB comes with VGA, S-Video, and DVI outputs, a common output configuration for cards in this price range.

Like the majority of the cards we're testing today, Abit has gone with a video encoder chip from Philips to handle outbound video streams. Abit uses the SAA7104E video encoder chip, which does NTSC/PAL at resolutions all the way up to 1280x1024. The chip is also capable of HDTV output, but features no support for decoding incoming video streams.

Siluro is embossed on the heat sink, but don't think that this is a custom Abit job; a very similar heat sink with a different name embossed along the top appears on another graphics card in this comparison. There's nothing wrong with the heat sink, and it does have those all-important push pins that allow for easy removal. We'll take advantage of that to inspect the thermal interface material being used.

Abit should be commended for its thermal paste application; there's just enough coverage on the GPU and heat sink to fill any imperfections on the respective surfaces. Not too much, not too little. Abit got this one just right, and that might help them out when we get to the overclocking portion of the review.

Hynix gets the call for the Siluro 64MB's memory chips, which are rated up to 500MHz DDR. The GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB is only supposed to have a memory clock of 500MHz, so the Hynix chips are right in line with NVIDIA's spec. You won't find any guaranteed memory head room here.

Abit includes a lot of goodies with the Siluro 64MB, but there's a lot more hardware than software. You'll find drivers and Abit's own SiluroDVD DVD player on the included CD, but that's it for software.

Hardware-wise, the bundle is stacked. A composite/S-Video Y-cable lets you use the included composite and S-Video cables at the same time, and the cables themselves are high-class. Not only do the cable lengths span over 80" each, the S-Video cable even has little plastic plug caps.

Abit also does well to include a DVI to VGA adapter to enable dual VGA multimonitor setups. Both of the GeForce4 Ti 4200's RAMDACs are on-chip, so you need only a DVI to VGA adapter to run two VGA monitors on any of the cards we're comparing today.