Software utilities that allow you to ramp up the clock speed of your graphics card have been around for years, but now Abit is upping the ante with the Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES, a graphics card that comes overclocked right out of the box, with a radical new cooling system thrown in for good measure. The card's Outside Thermal Exhaust System is unlike anything I've seen on a production graphics product, and it's Abit's latest stab at pushing the bleeding edge of system performance.

Is this factory-overclocked GeForce4 Ti 4200 really all that? Is OTES the shape of things to come for graphics cooling? We've examined the card, overclocked it, and tested its 3D performance and noise levels to find out. Read on to see what we found.

Abit's Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES

The chip
The Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES is based on NVIDIA's venerable Geforce4 Ti 4200 GPU, a favorite of budget-conscious gamers looking for frame rates without having to empty their wallets. We've already covered the GeForce4 Ti 4200 extensively here at TR, and for a refresh of the chip's features and performance you can check our initial review, our GeForce4 Ti 4200 round-up and our review of the updated GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X.

A GeForce4 Ti 4200 GPU lurks under the goo

Although the Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES is actually based on the GeForce4 Ti 4200 GPU, the card's core and memory clock speeds match those of the faster GeForce4 Ti 4400. Here's how the respective fill rates and memory bandwidth shape up:

The Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES is overclocked right out of the box, and the boost in clock speeds gives the card minor advantages in fill rate and available memory bandwidth. We'll see how these minor clock speed differences affect the card's performance a little later.