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 CONTENTS
In spite of the ongoing holidays we keep on testing new video cards from NVIDIA. The company is going to release a new High-End product in several months already, but there's no news from the Middle-End sector, and it's quite possible that the current middling cards will have a long market life. It's not easy to write positively about a product the price of which
doesn't match its capabilities, even the low-end model of the FX 5900 series.
No secret that the market is being flooded with the FX 5900 XT earlier
named FX 5900SE/LX/CP, and their prices are rapidly falling down. Who might
need the FX 5700 Ultra if the prices are almost equal? Our reviews listed
below clearly show the difference between the 5700 and 5900.
Theoretical materials and reviews of video cards which concern functional properties of the GPU NVIDIA GeForce FX
The FX 5700 Ultra halves some parameters of the FX 5950 Ultra (except the vertex shader). It means that the FX 5900 clocked at 400 MHz against 475 MHz will be stronger than the 5700 Ultra. Plus the 256-bit bus. The 5900 XT coupled with 700 MHz memory and such bus will beat the the FX 5700U with its 900 MHz memory and 128-bit bus. Also remember that almost all FX 5900XT/LX/SE are able to raise their clock speed up to the level of the FX 5900 Ultra. The 5700 Ultra GPUs have a good overclocking potential as well. But it doesn't help them much with only one megapipeline with 4 pixels per clock in cooperation with 4 texture processors. Plus, there's a problem with the clock speeds on the driver 53.03 which doesn't let lifting it up over 300 MHz. You can restore the performance by uninstalling the driver, cleaning the register and installing it again. This bug in the driver is very annoying for overclockers. Nevertheless, the cards are selling, and users have the right to know what they are able of and which card is better. Besides, the prices drop down bit by bit, and it's possible that a user reading this review after a time can find such cards quite tasty if the price is matching. Cards
All the cards are based on the reference design. AOpen put in the box the very reference card. Only InnoVision changed the design a little bit. Have a look at the coolers.
Here's how it looks with the backlight.  Sparkle's card is equipped with the external Philips 7114 TV codec which works with Video-In, and the card supports VIVO, though the TV-out is realized in the GeForce FX5700 Ultra. The other cards are outfitted only with a TV-out. Package contents.
Have a look at the packages:
Testbed and driversTestbed:
VSync off, S3TC off in applications. Test resultsBefore we start examining 2D quality, I should say there are no complete techniques for objective 2D quality estimation because:
With the ViewSonic P817 monitor and BNC Bargo cable the cards showed excellent
quality at the following resolutions and clock speeds:
Test results: performanceTest application:
Test order: press '~' and type in the console the following: demo [file name] (press Enter)
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter v.1.05 (Croteam/GodGames) - OpenGL, multitexturing, ixbt0703 demo, test settings: quality Test order: press '~' and type in the console the following: run demo from the menu
Run the test the following way:
ixbt0703demo test scene.
test settings: pixel shaders 1.1, shadow buffers OFF.
PerformanceOverclocked cards are marked red, clock speeds follow 'o/c' sign.
ConclusionAll the cards look equal, though it's difficult to give a palm of supremacy to the 5700 Ultra based cards as the FX 5900XT have nearly the same price. I just want to say that Sparkle's card is equipped with VIVO and ships in a beautiful box. Inno3D's card will be cheaper than the rest, but it has a good software suite and boasts of the effective backlight. Compared to the earlier tested cards from AOpen, this one has no distinguishing features. This is just a copy of the reference solution in AOpen's box. Even the proprietary tweaker doesn't work with it saying that there's no OpenBIOS technology. The price will clear up the things. In our 3Digest you can find full comparison
characteristics for video cards of this and other classes.
Andrey Vorobiev (anvakams@ixbt.com)
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