The Geforce4 Ti4200 is not a new card; it was introduced in May, 2002.  It occupies the lower rung of the Geforce4 product line (not to be confused with the Geforce4 MX series, which consists of revamped Geforce2s).  The Ti4200 comes in 64mb and 128mb versions.  The Ti4400 and the Ti4600 were introduced around the same time.  These cards primarily are distinguished from each other by their different graphic's chip and memory chip clock speeds.  The Ti4200 reference design also calls for a physically smaller card (about 2 inches shorter in length), compared to the Ti4400 and Ti4600.

A quick look at the table above shows that Asus V8420S model Ti4200 is something of a Ti4200 Ultra.  Its graphics processor is running 4% faster than the regular Ti4200s, and it's memory is as fast as that of the Ti4400s.  The card also looks more like a Ti4400 than a Ti4200 in terms of its appearance.  Most other Ti4200s use a smaller card format with a kind of memory chip that tends to be physically bigger.  Not the V8420S.  It basically is identical to the Ti4400 and Ti4600 boards in physical dimensions and appearance.  (The V8420S Review done by the Digit-Life site shows this very well.  Scroll down to where they compare pictures of the V8420S with the Nvidia reference model Ti4200 and Nvidia reference model Ti4600.)

Although the V8420S's memory is already running at the same speed as is typical for the faster Ti4400 cards, it is using memory rated at 3.3ns, which is faster than the typical 3.6ns memory used on most Ti4400s.  The card that I'm looking at uses EtronTech memory, though other brands, such as Hynix, may also be found on these cards.

3.3ns translates into 300 mHz (or 600 mHz, DDR), suggesting that overclocking the memory on this card should not pose a problem.  In fact, I've been running this card's memory conservatively overclocked to Ti4600 speeds (652 mHz DDR) for over a year and a half, now.  

I've already situated the V8420S in relation to Nvidia'a Geforce4 lineup, but it might also be helpful to situate this card in relation to other Asus Ti4200 cards.  They offer a V8420TD, which is their standard Ti4200 card (meaning a smaller card with the standard Ti4200 clock speeds) and the V8420 Deluxe, which is very similar to the V8420S but with the addition of Video In/Video Out (VIVO) and the 3D virtual reality (VR) glasses.  The V8420S and the V8420 Deluxe share the same basic card layout and the same clock speeds.  So, it might be best to think of the V8420S as a pared down Deluxe model, which retains the overclocked core and memory of the Deluxe model.

Asus also offers a couple of 8X AGP models.  One is similar to the V8420S Deluxe described above, but the graphic core's speed has been bumped up to 275 mHz and the memory is running at 300 mHz (600 mHz DDR).  This "super fast" Ti4200 8X AGP is the V9280S, and it seems more like a beefed up Ti4400 than a Ti4200 card.  There also is a more generic Ti4200 8X AGP, called the V9280TD, which runs at the typical Ti4200 core and memory speeds of 250 mHz and 256 mHz (512 mHz DDR), respectively.

As far as I can tell, whether you get a newer card capable of 8X AGP or not is unimportant.  All the motherboards that support 8X AGP also support 4X AGP, and I've yet to see a review that shows any advantage to having the 8X AGP card over a 4X AGP card.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the Ti4200 that "dates" it is that it does not have native hardware support for the latest DirectX 9 graphics features.    

Update January 31, 2004: I had the opportunity to briefly test out this video card in a system running a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor.  The results made very clear how much the Ti4200 is held back when it is paired with a PIII-1000 GHz processor.  I didn't duplicate all my previously run benchmarks with the Pentium 4 system, but I added the overall 3DMark 2001SE score and the Vulpine GLMark score for the Ti4200 paired with a Pentium 4 2.4C to the appropriate graphs.

Another Update January 26, 2005: I added some information on how well this card overclocks.  I've actually been running it at Ti4600 speeds (302 core/652 DDR memory), since soon after I installed this card.  I've had no difficulty with these overclocked speeds for well over a year and a half, now.  The results added below show how the card's performance scales going from it's original stock speed, through the equivalent of a Ti4600's speeds, and up to what appear to be the card's highest overclocked speeds.  These overclocking results were run on an Athlon XP system.  The CPU was running at 11 x 211 mHz for a speed of 2300 mHz (maybe the equivalent of an Athlon XP 3300, if such a processor existed).

3DMark 2001 SE

I'll start out by looking at the results of this popular and easy to use benchmark.

These results give us two things to look at.  We can see how the upgrading the video card from a Geforce2 to a Geforce4 increases the performance of a Pentium 3 1000 GHz system, and we can see how we get nearly the same amount of improvement (almost 4000 points), when we upgrade the processor, as well, to a Pentium 4 2.4GHz model.

Vulpine GLMark

This test is getting a bit dated, but it is still convenient.  It provides an OpenGL test to compliment the DirectX capabilities of 3DMark2001.

Although still a healthy increase, the improvement in the score with the Ti4200 card, compared to the Geforce2, is not as significant as with the 3DMark tests, but when we add in the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor, the score really takes off.  Once again indicating that this TI4200 only going to be as fast as the CPU allows it to run.

Comanche 4 Demo

The Comanche 4 Demo includes a benchmarking utility, so we'll turn to it next.  It provides more of a real (game) world test than the above benchmarks do.

Here we see the difference between the two video cards narrowing.  In part, this may be because the demo is fairly dependent upon the CPU for performance, as well as the video card.  

This finding provides a nice lead into the next benchmark, which is based on Battlezone 2.  Although Battlezone 2 is visually very demanding, having a powerful CPU is also critical to your system keeping up with this game.

Battlezone 2

The average frame rate was taken from a campaign mission in the Forgotten Enemies mod of Battlezone 2.  During this time, your units come under attack from a large enemy force; so, there is plenty of activity going on.  

I think the relatively small difference made by the newer video card is due to how much the CPU is critical to running this game.  My own speculation is that this is due to a couple of factors.  First, there are a lot of AI units to control and manage the pathing for in this game, and second, the game engine is a bit old and can't take advantage of what newer video cards can do with visual effects "in hardware".  Instead, it would appear that the CPU is being left to carry a significant part of the visual rendering load (especially when it comes to lighting effects).  This would have been a good benchmark to retest on the Pentium 4 2.4 GHz system, but unfortunately I didn't do so.

Overclocking Capabilities and Results

I've had good results with overclocking this video card; I've basically been using it as a Ti4600 with the core at 302 mHz and the memory at 652 mHz DDR for over a year and a half.  I should mention that I replaced the stock heatsink and fan with a Thermaltake replacement kit.  This was because the stock fan soon developed an annoying sound when it was starting up.  As it turned out, the fan with the Thermaltake heatsink was not any better and soon started making noises, itself.  I've since replaced the Thermaltake fan with one from a Radeon 9700 Pro.

The biggest problem with the Thermaltake heatsink was that it would not install properly, because the bottom was not flat.  It had such a hump to it that the heatsink would rock to one side and lift up the other half of it from contact with the graphics chip.  After taking the time to lap the bottom of the heatsink, it now fits flush with the graphics chip, and this all copper heatsink performs quite well.

The Thermaltake heatsink kit also comes with some little heatsinks for the memory chips.  I've only gotten around to installing them lately.  The kit includes some double-sided, sticky, thermal tape for attaching these heatsinks, but I opted to permanently glue them on with Arctic Silver's thermal epoxy.  I can't say that these memory heatsinks have made much difference in terms of how far I can overclock the memory.  I don't think the memory chips  were ever getting that hot to begin with.  Nevertheless, they seem to be in good contact with the memory chips and doing whatever they can to add some further cooling.  This conclusion is based on my careful assessment, which involves placing a finger to the heatsinks while the computer is busy working its way through video benchmarks.

For some reason, the heatsinks were of very different heights.  I put the taller heatsinks on the front and the shallower ones on the back.

I selected three sets of core and memory speeds to show how this card scales when being overclocked.  The 261 mHz core and the 550 mHz DDR memory speeds are the stock settings.  The 302 mHz/652 mHz DDR speeds are the same as those used by a stock Ti4600.   And, the 339 mHz/689 mHz DDR speeds appear to be close to the maximums that this card can run.  The card locked up almost immediately when trying to run a 3D benchmark with the core at 350 mHz, and I noticed some slight artifacts appearing with the card's memory running at 697 mHz DDR.

First, let's look at how things scale running 3DMark2001SE at the default resolution of 1024 x 768 x 32 bit color.

That's not too bad.  We've bumped the core up by nearly 30% and the memory up by about 25%, and as a result we are seeing about a 15% increase in performance.

We see even better results when we look at 3DMark2001SE run at a high resolution of 1600 x1200 x 32 bit color and when we look at Aquamark3 run at its default 1024x 768 x 32 settings.

We are now getting a 22% increase in performance on 3DMark2001SE, and we see a 28% increase in performance on the Aquamark3 benchmark.  Given these results, I think we can safely say that this video card overclocks very well.

Battlefield 1942

This game was my primary motivation for upgrading my system's video card.  Battlefield 1942 just wasn't happy on a 32 mb video card.  32 mb of video memory meets the minimum specifications for a system to play the game, but the recommendation is for 64 mb of video memory.  The game is quite playable using the 32 mb Geforce 2 video card, but the graphics details and the texture sizes have to be kept to a minimum.  Bumping the graphics details up beyond their lowest settings results in the game becoming unplayable due to a jerking or "chugging" quality to the video rendering.  Instead of a smooth fluid flow of scenery, as you panned your view around, you would get a constant series of hesitations or pauses.  My hunch is that the video card was having to access system memory because it had used up all the room available to the onboard video memory.  This is a much slower process than if everything can be handled on the video card, and the game had to wait on the slower data source.

Since the problem that I ran into with this game wasn't really related to frames per second but rather to the level of video quality that I could use, I think some pictures will tell the story better than numbers and graphs can.  In the following series of paired pictures, the first is taken at 800x600x16 resolution with all the graphics details turned down (except for view distance), and the second is a similar picture taken at 800x600x32 resolution with all the graphics details set to their highest.  All these pictures were taken using the Ti4200 card, but they convey what the difference was like in going from the Geforce2 card to the Ti4200 card.

Unfortunately, these snapshots don't fully convey the impact of being able to play this game with the higher graphics settings enabled, because they don't carry the feeling of being immersed in the game world.  Also, since I had gotten use to playing the game at the lower graphics settings, the change to something much sharper and more vivid was startling.  I had the sense of finally getting to see the game as it was suppose to look.  It was as if I had been working in a dimly lit room and suddenly someone turned on the lights.

The Geforce 4 video cards are no longer really available (except perhaps on eBay), as Nvidia is a couple of generations beyond their Ti4000 cards by now.  However, this card continues to perform well with my favorite games, since they do not require DirectX 9.  I suspect that my next video card upgrade will come when there finally is a killer online game that does make use of DirectX 9 features.

In the meanwhile, I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of this $150 card.  My only complaints about it have been minor ones.  

The fan that was included, like those on many video cards these days, turned out to be a poor one.  

I also wish that Asus had made available hardware monitoring for this video card.  The Asus V8420 Deluxe (as well as my old Geforce2 GTS, for that matter) has hardware monitoring capabilities built into the board, and Asus has a nice hardware monitoring utility, SmartDoctor, for keeping an eye on things like the video card's fan speed, the graphics chip's temperature, and video card's voltages.  Given how this card is billed as part of Asus's "Super Fast" line of video cards, it seems like the hardware monitoring should have been kept, even when other items were stripped away from the Deluxe package to make this model.  The hardware monitor would have been useful to the enthusiast as he or she was tweaking this card's clock setting or perhaps trying out an after market cooling solution.  By omitting the hardware monitoring on the V8420S, I think that Asus missed an opportunity to make it even more appealing to the portion of the market that they appeared to be pitching this "overclocked", no frills, video card to.  

The Digit-Life review of the V8420S, mentioned earlier.

Since there aren't many reviews of the V8420S, I've thrown in some looks at the Deluxe model, which the V8420S seems to be derived from

HardOCP review of the V8420 Deluxe.

HotHardware review of the V8420 Deluxe.

8 Ball's Hardware review of the V8420 Deluxe.

Got Apex review of the V8420 Deluxe.