Gainwards PowerPack Ultra/650 TV video adapter card is based on the older NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 with AGP 4x support. This is not really a bad thing since most motherboards sold until recently only support the 4x standard and tests on the newer 8x components show very little performance gains. The board comes supplied with 128MB of DDR video and has 1 standard video monitor port and a TV video out connector. It supports dual displays, but only one through a monitor as the other uses the video out.

The card supports DirectX 8.1 used by most of today's games. One of the big drawbacks is that it does not support DirectX 9. While DirectX 9 hasn't been released yet, there are already several games in development using the new feature sets. Any game that takes advantage of the new features will be lost with this card. This does give it a drawback of not being future compatible for all of the visuals in games such as Doom 4.

Performance of the card is very respectable for the price of the card. It is able to provide smooth frame rates on most of today's games. It scored 11,137 on the 3DMark2001SE benchmark in a system featuring a Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz processor, Intel 845GE chipset and 512MB of DDR400 RAM. Enabling of high detail features such as antialiasing or anisotropic filtering will decrease the frame rate of the games so it is no longer as smooth. If you are looking for these features, it would be advised to look for a higher end Ti4600 based card or ATI Radeon 9700 line card.

For individuals who have modified cases with windows that show off their computer components, the card will not disappoint. The PCB and heatsink fan on the graphics processor are both a distinctive red color making it a highly visible component inside the case.

If there are some features that are not supported by this specific card, Gainward offers a wide variety of version of the Ti4200 card line. If you need support for multiple monitors, DVI output for an LCD panel or slightly higher performance Gainward has options for all of these. There is also a lower end option available that does not have a TV output and only 64MB of video memory.

In the end, this card is a very affordable solution for those individuals who are on a budget but want a card that can play today's 3D PC games or want a distinctive card to show off inside of their computer.

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