Introduction

PNY Technologies is quickly becoming a common name in video cards in the United States.  Three years ago, we couldn’t have said that.   PNY has been in business since 1985, marketing memory, flash peripherals and media, including Compact Flash, RAM, Smart Media, and CD-R/RW media, but their award winning Verto graphics line-up was only introduced in 2001.  But now you’ll see their products at many of the biggest retailers, including Buy.com and BestBuy.  PNY now produces a full line-up of NVIDIA based graphics cards, ranging from the low end, PCI Vanta all the way to the very top with the workstation Quadro cards.

Today, we’re looking at PNY’s Verto GeForce4 Ti4200 64MB version.  There is also a 128MB version, and as we all know, the 128MB version uses slower RAM.  Street pricing on this card is currently at $125.

PNY uses the age old cardboard box for delivery of their video cards.  With the package, you get only a paper manual and a driver CD, besides the video card.  Personally, the extra materials often shipped with cards (game demos and/or a $10 copy of Power DVD) can be over rated.  I was pleased to see an actual paperback manual.  The driver CD also has a quick reference sticker on it, which details what should be done to install the video card.  This is a small and helpful addition by PNY.

Interestingly, the PCB of the Verto is purple, and the color exactly matches that of the cover of the box (which makes for a poor picture, on my part).  The front of the card shows the NVIDIA reference style, ducted heatsink and fan.  This heatsink style is an efficient cooler, in my experience.  It does not interfere with the adjacent PCI slot either.  There are also separate, thin heatsinks on the RAM. 

The back of the card also shows heatsinks on the ram.  There are a total of 8 DDR chips on the board.  Each being 8MB modules.  Since they’re covered by the heatsinks, we cannot determine what their rating speed is. I’d suspect that their 3.8 or 4ns modules.

The Verto contains the standard Ti4200 connector set.  A DVI digital port, S-Video port for TV-out, and the standard VGA plug.

Specifications

Ti 4200 Features & Benefits

• 64MB DDR memory (500MHz memory clock) provides increased frame rates for faster game play
• 8.0GB/sec. memory bandwidth
• Unique maroon-colored card
• Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ (LMA) II - Delivers twice the memory bandwidth of GeForce3 graphics cards
• NVIDIA nfiniteFX™ II engine
• Enhanced Vertex and Pixel shaders, with new Z-Correct Bump Mapping technology
• Accuview™ Antialiasing
• Dual Vertex Shaders
• Advanced Pixel Shaders
• 3D textures
• Shadow buffers
• Z-Correct Bump
• Lossless Z Compression
• Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
• TV-Out and Video
• Microsoft® DirectX®, 8.X and OpenGL

Compatibility Designed to WHQL Compatibility Standards

• Windows XP, 2000, 98, 95, ME, NT® 4.0 display drivers
• Microsoft DirectDraw®, Direct3D®, DirectVideo®, and ActiveX® drivers
• OpenGL ICD for Windows XP, 2000, 98, 95, and NT
• Complete Linux display and OpenGL drivers support
• Fully PC00, PC99 and PC99a compliant

Minimum System Requirements  

• 350 Watt Power Supply (this is claimed, I’ve run Ti4200s on 300W PS’s fine)
• Intel Pentium ® II, AMD K6-2® class processor Intel Pentium® II, AMD K6-2® class processor or higher
• AGP 2.0 or higher expansion port  (AGP 4x max.)
• 64MB system RAM
• CD-ROM drive
• 20MB available disk space
• Windows 95 OSR2, 98 or higher
• Windows NT4.0 with Service Pack 5 or 6

Warranty

• PNY offers a lifetime replacement warranty.

PNY’s Verto is using 128-bit DDR SDRAM running at 500MHz.  This is slightly faster than the 128M versions, which typically run at 444-450MHz. The core speed remains constant over the Ti4200 line-ups.  The core speed is consistently 250MHz.

Installation

I recently bought a Yeong-Yang cube, server case.  It’s nice for the testing work that I do since the case is divided in half where the motherboard resides in one half and all of the drives reside in the other half.  This keeps the motherboard side very tidy (while the drive side is still a tangle of cables!).   Installing video cards into this case is very easy since the doors for both halves rotate on a hinge.  They don’t need screws to stay in place, either.  Under Windows XP, since I was already running an NVIDIA card, I simply shut the computer off and swapped cards.  On the reboot, WinXP already had the drivers in place for the PNY Verto GF4 Ti4200.  If I hadn’t had the drivers installed already, the process wouldn’t have been much different, since WinXP is so amicable.  I would still have swapped cards, then simply installed the drivers after WinXP couldn’t find the card (you might have to just cancel the automated search for drivers, then install the supplied EXE drivers).  After a reboot, you’ll be running fine.