The ViVo card that doesn't compromise performance for price.

I bought this card from NewEgg.com in November for $169. Since then the price hasn't changed much because it was already a very good bargain.

Features:
* nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200
* 64MB DDR RAM
* Video In (Composite, S-Video)
* DVI Output
* VGA Output
* S-Video/Composite Output

Software:
* MSI Specific Drivers (allows overclocking of GPU and Memory)
* MSI Live Update (monitors system for new graphics BIOS and drivers)
* MSI Utilities; Memory Util, System Monitor
* Intermedia WinProducer with WinCoder
* MSI DVD Player
* No One Lives Forever game

Performance:
I'm not going to post benchmark numbers since they are arbitrary and heavily influenced by the rest of the system. I will instead give anectdotal evidence of my experiences with the card in two different computers.

First, I bought the card for a Pentium 4 running 2.7Ghz with a 150Mhz FSB (600mhz in Intel Marketing Speak). The games I primarily play are Dark Age of Camelot: Shrouded Isles, WWE Raw, Warcraft 3 and Civilization 3. DAoC: SI is a very graphically intense game. It uses many DirectX 8 features that look awesome on this card and do not bog down the system at 1024x768 or even 1280x1024. The Antialiasing is wonderful and at the lower resolutions has no noticable performance loss. In WWE Raw the action can be quite fast and the card never falls behind. The in-ring action is solid, smooth and renderened with all of the bells and whistles turned on. Warcraft 3 is the same story. The only game that doesn't behave as well as some cards is Civilization 3. The game refuses to run at the Desktop resolution on this card, instead defaulting to 1024x768. I do not have the problem on the same machine if I use a Radeon based video card.

On the Pentium 4 video capture is very impressive: so long as you are capturing with software that encodes the video stream and doesn't let the hardware do it. Unfortunately the bundled software (WinProducer) let's the driver do the encoding when capturing and so you must capture the stream as AVI or it will look HORRIBLE. The built-in MPEG encoding on the card is simply useless. This is the biggest weakness of both the card and the bundle. Another problem is that this card should have included a Digital Video Recorder program such as WinDVR.

I moved this video card to my multi-media system which has an AMD Athlon Thunderbird processer at 1.4Ghz. I use it primarily as a video capture device for TV-shows. I purchased WinDVR (at a rather steep $79) and since WinDVR handles the video encoding duties, it does a fabulous job of capturing video. Setting WinDVR to it's high quality setting results in a DVR experience similar to hardware-based DVR systems from Tivo and ReplayTV.

The multimedia system is attached to a Sanyo 25" TV through SVideo and the picture is extra sharp, especially compared to the Radeo VE card that previously resided in that system. Text is very readable, even on webpages that insist on putting 8 point fonts in a very small space (ahem, ESPN). If you have Windows98 you can use the WebTV browser included in the OS which is geared towards TV use and reduces the side to side scrolling a bit.

Conclusion:
MSI could have put a little more effort into the software bundle, which is the card's biggest problem. Forget the game and include WinDVR. For a little more include a remote control like ATI does with their All-In-Wonder line.

Game performance is very good and video capture is great if you use the right software.