Okay, so Poladyne ... I did not know what it means plus I had checked three on-line dictionaries and they agree. It's not an existing word.
Well, who can explain it batter than Compro themselves, people usually associate Poladyne with the knight or fighter. But Poladyne also has other meanings. In Chinese, Po-la can be translated into "a person who tries to catch the thunder", Dyne should make you think of DYNamic power.
When we went to the Compro website I noticed something interesting though. They are releasing two versions/series of cards. The Poladyne and Poladyne OC. The 'normal' Poladyne series is equipped with standard components while the OC series (and now it's getting interesting for all of us) is especially designed for tweaking the graphics card. It's very interesting that a company made the call to follow this road. obviously I received the OC product as PCB has been equipped with BGA memory. That's like cream on your ice. BGA stands for Ball Grid Array, it means that the solder connection points joining the memory chips to the module board are spaced over a grid rather than is a straight line (like the traditional memory chips). This design feature reduces the cross talk of signal information and allows for better routing of the traces. The net result is a memory that is more stable, runs cooler and works better with high speed GPUs.
Right now Compro is aiming at at four levels in the graphics card market with the following line-up:
In the table below you can pinpoint the exact position of this product compared to compared to other product in the GeForce 4 range. I suggest you take a look at the following table:
| |
MX 420 |
MX 440 |
MX 460 |
Ti 4200 |
Ti 4400 |
Ti 4600 |
| Number of Transistors (Millions) |
29 |
29 |
29 |
63 |
63 |
63 |
| Manufacturing Process (microns) |
.15 |
.15 |
.15 |
.15 |
.15 |
.15 |
| Rendering Pipelines |
2 |
2 |
2 |
4 |
4 |
4 |
| Texture per Pass |
4 |
4 |
4 |
8 |
8 |
8 |
| Core Clock (MHz) |
250 |
270 |
300 |
250 |
275 |
300 |
| Memory Clock (MHz) |
166 |
200 |
275 |
250 |
275 |
325 |
| Memory Amount (MB) |
64 |
64 |
64 |
128 |
128 |
128 |
| Memory Type |
5.5ns |
4ns |
3.6ns |
4ns |
3.6ns |
3ns |
| RAMDAC |
350 MHz |
350 MHz |
350 MHz |
350 MHz |
350 MHz |
350 MHz |
| Fill Rate (gigatexels) |
1.0 |
1.08 |
1.2 |
2.0 |
2.2 |
2.4 |
| Fill Rate (megapixels) |
500 |
540 |
600 |
900 |
1100 |
1200 |
| Fill Rate (millions of Triangles/sec.) |
31 |
34 |
38 |
114 |
125 |
136 |
| Bandwidth (GB/s) |
2.66 |
6.4 |
8.8 |
8.0 |
8.8 |
10.4 |
Now quickly look at the Ti 4200 default specifications like NVIDIA set them about a year ago. Now let me tell you the default core frequency of the card .. 275 MHz. The memory is clocked default at 554 MHz. As you can see at standard this card almost already runs at Ti 4400 speeds. In fact it's almost right on par with the new Ti 4800SE model and that fact by itself makes it a very interesting buy for the money.
So this particular model we are reviewing today should competition wise be between the 4200 nearing 4400 at default clock speeds with it's default 250 MHz core clockspeed. The features of the GeForce4 (read keywords) you need to remember, for the GeForce4 Titanium / NV 25 are Accuview, nView, nfiniteFX II Vertex Shaders, nfiniteFX II Pixel Shaders and Lightspeed Memory Architecture II. Let us look at some innovations and specs of the GeForce4 Ti series with you that where provided by NVIDIA:
- 63 million transistors (3 million more than GeForce3)
- Manufactured in TSMC's .15 µ process
- Chip clock 225 - 300 MHz
- Memory clock 500 - 650 MHz
- Memory bandwidth 8,000 - 10,400 MB/s
- TnL Performance of 75 - 100 million vertices/s
- 128 MB frame buffer by default
- nfiniteFX II engine
- Accuview Anti Aliasing
- Light Speed Memory Architecture II
- nView
One thing is a sure fact, 3.3ns memory can easily take that ~550 MHz clock frequency. Let's do our usual round of calculations shall we and bare in mind that a normal Ti 4200 would have a bandwidth of roughly 8000 MB/sec, we are talking about the faster 64MB model here btw.
There's a simple way to calculate everything you need to know, you just need to look at the memory chips and note the last numbers on the chip as it will state how fast they are or simple write down the series number and check it on the manufacturer website.
Let's calculate the nominal speed for this memory:
1000:3.3ns x 2 (DDR) = 606 MHz
Hey .. it's clocked at 555 MHz, that means there is plenty of room for overclocking and at default we can set it at 606 MHz ! Now that we have calculated nominal memory bandwidth and can see that the ram modules deliver the frequency that NVIDIA states we can raise the bar a step and calculate memory bandwidth:
(2x128bit) x (2:606MHz) : 8bit = 9696 MB/sec That's about a 1696 MB/sec above standard specification.
When we fired up SiSoft's Sandra and took a peek at technical specifications we noticed that the latest A3 revision of the GeForce4 GPU was used on this videocard. A3 is the latest build of the GPU and is also being used on any GeForce4 Ti 4600. Combined with the internally designed PCB I think we'll be able to tweak this puppy to roughly 300 MHz but more on that later in our overclocking part of the review.
DDR memory rated 3,3ns - click image for high-resolution photo
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