ABIT brings high speed graphics to budget GeForce4
New cooling system the key
ABIT is making a play for the high performance graphics market with a new cooling system that it claims will allow you to push performance of a GeForce4 Ti4200 chip up to the level of a Ti4600. The company has just completed a European tour extolling the virtues of the Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES, which will be available on 23rd September, and expects a UK street price for the card below £150, so you get Ti4600 for about half the price. It works like this. OTES (Outside Thermal Exhaust System) uses some of the ideas from notebook cooling systems, although it clearly doesn't steal them wholesale, because it's patent-pending. It uses a vacuum to seal the Ti4200 on a copper base, then a 7,2000 rpm fan to cool the system. This of course just gives you a cooler card, so in order to actually deliver the extra performance Abit is shipping overclocking tools with it. There's one easy set intended to make it easier for normal people to mess with their settings, and the real stuff for the hard bastards. Which is interesting, because overclocking is generally the province of the latter category, so can it be consumerised? Possibly not on a really widespread basis, but extending it into the class of people who might if they weren't too scared to looks viable to us. Following up on next week's rollout ABIT intends to put out OTES versions of its higher performance cards, which should appeal to the less financially-challenged overclocker. The company currently has some illustrations and explanations of the technology here, but you can take a look at some better pics at All About PC, here. We realise the article's in German, but we were very taken with "OTES? Who the fuxx is OTES?" as an intro line.