Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, SecretSquirrel
I like the design, but unfortunately no. The Leadtechs certainly are not bad, but are they worth paying extra for? Read on.
The 2 fans make a lot more noise and the huge oversized HS is overkill and unnecessary. It all adds to a very hefty weight. Some people have tried to disconnect 1 of the fans to stop the noise and ended up frying the board. Leadtech have also been known to ship old drivers (even on the web), but then which companies don't now-a-days?
The best additional cooling to enhance o/c are HS on the RAM chips and fast rated memory. Anything above or beyond this has seemed almost completely futile from the many reviews I've read. Here's one:
All manufacturer's cards based upon the same chipset only differ in performance by 0.5% (half of 1%) which is within the normal benchmark deviation anyway. I would let price, features and the software bundles be the deciding factors, in that order.
Even when taking o/c in to account, there is only a 3% difference between the best and worst, which again I would put down to the natural variance of the manufacturing process. Extreme or original designs and cooling solutions don't really seem to play a part, they were only really worth it for the GF3TI200. A final note on the 'golden sample' or similar cards; you tend to find the next card up will perform better for near enough the same price, I'd go for a TI4600 over a TI4400 Golden Sample any day.
As always, shop around and see what's available for what prices in your area.
Athlon 1ghz is still a fine CPU, while it won't get the most out of the 4200, it will still get a huge increase over the TNT2, and as a wise man once said, crank up the AA & Anisotropic to soak up the additional GPU power.
Also look below, that Athlon 1ghz should reach 1.33 even with an older mobo.
I'd have apink 4200 in plain view anyday if it replaced a TNT2, a fine card in its day, and not pink. But the 4200 will flyyyyyyy.