Overclocking with OTES
The Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES comes overclocked to GeForce4 Ti 4400 speeds right out of the box, but don't think that was going to stop me from turning up the clock speed a little. In testing, I was able to get the card stable and artifact-free with core and memory clock speeds of 315 and 585MHz, respectively. A 45MHz core overclock is nothing to sneeze at, but honestly, I was hoping for something more exceptional. The memory overclocking results are less than impressive as well, especially since the memory chips are rated to run at 275MHz.

I also overclocked Abit's vanilla Siluro GeForce4 Ti 4200, and that added insult to injury. The vanilla card, with stock cooling, ran stable with core and memory clock speeds of 320 and 620MHz, respectively—both faster than the OTES card. What's especially remarkable is that the vanilla Siluro uses memory chips rated to only 250MHz.

Just for kicks, I swapped the OTES apparatus for a stock cooler on the card just to see what would happen. To my surprise, the card was still stable and artifact-free running with a 315MHz core clock speed. The limitation here is the GPU itself, which probably won't make it past 315MHz with any kind of air cooling.

In all fairness, Abit's OTES probably allows them to more consistently overclock GPUs to the 275MHz stock speed for these cards. Also, the GPU should run a little cooler than it would with stock cooling, which should make for a more stable setup with greater longevity.

In the end, our results illustrate how much successful overclocking requires luck, pixie dust, and usually a small sacrifice. There are no guarantees when running hardware out of spec.

3DMark2001 SE

Core and memory clock speeds are going to be the defining factors, at least as far as our 3D performance benchmarks go. The Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES occupies the middle of the pack, both at stock and overclocked speeds. At least in 3DMark2001 SE, there benefits of overclocking are fairly consistent once we get out of extremely low resolutions.