MSI GeForce4 Ti4800SE 8X VIVO Video Card

Company: Micro-Star International
Product: G4Ti4800SE-VTD Video Card
Street Price: ~$180 USD
Date Reviewed: March 30, 2003
Reviewed By: Jason R.
Rating: (9.8/10)

Overclocking:

The MSI Ti4800SE comes at a stock speed of 275 MHz Core & 550 MHz (DDR) Memory. I was able to overclock this card to a maximum of 315 MHz Core & 685 MHz Memory without any artifacting. This is about 15MHz core & 100MHz memory more than I was able to get with the Ti4200-8X. As always, your results may vary on what you can overclock your card to. I haven't removed the stock heatsink yet to see how well thermal compound is applied, so I might be able to squeeze a few more MHz out of the core.

Conclusions:

The MSI Ti4800SE-VTD is an excellent card with a lot of flexibility. With features such as Dual VGA support, VIVO, and a TON of full version bundled software, and priced around $180 you can't go wrong. Overclocking was on par with what I've seen similar cards do. As far as technical support goes, MSI has a 2 year warranty of their motherboards according to their website, however it doesn't say anything about their video cards so I am assuming it would be the same warranty length. Using the live update program makes it a since to update everything related to the video card, and the MSI website has a support forum and FAQs too.

Pros:
  Excellent Cost / Performance Ratio
  NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture
  Better Than Reference Design Cooling
  Linux Support
  Lots Of Full Version Bundled Software
  All Cables & Adapters Included
  8X AGP Support

Cons:
  No DirectX 9.0 Support (Limitation of all GF4 cards)
  GeForce 4 Cards Are Not The Fastest Available