The GeForce4 Ti series of cards is NVIDIA's fastest running, and one of the hottest, graphics cards to date. To keep this line of cards cool, NVIDIA has included their own proprietary cooler that is designed to not only cool the core, but also give the front-mounted BGA memory chips a break by also blowing air overtop of them.
For the high-end portion of this article we went with the VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti4400. We choose to overclock the Ti 4400 as opposed to the Ti 4600 because of the Ti 4400's higher potential, lower price tag, and inherently better overclocking value. As we've seen from past reviews, the GeForce4 Ti 4600's 300 MHz core and 650 MHz memory speeds strike a near-perfect balance, and overclocking a lower-speed GeForce4 Ti 4400 or 4200 yields significantly higher percentage increases. Our goal for this card was to achieve at least Ti4600 speeds, and anything higher than that was just icing on the cake.
For this card we chose to leave the stock heatsink fan, as this cools quite well and there is really no cost-effective setup that provides better performance than NVIDIA's own design. We did perform some cooling enhancements, and strapped on eight aluminum fin heatsinks (the same ones we used with the MX440), onto the BGA (Ball Grid Array) memory. The BGA memory runs inherently cooler than its old style brethren TSOP (Thin Small Outline Package), so we'll have to see how much of an impact it had. To cool the memory further we used a Panaflo L1A 80mm 24CFM fan that was already in our case.
