PixelView GeForce FX 5900 XT Golden Limited
Manufacturer: Prolink
MSRP: € 210
One of the most successful products in the GeForce FX line-up from NVIDIA has to be the GeForce FX 5900 XT. You simply can't go wrong with this product can you? It offers the full 5900 series architecture and thus a big proportion of that high-end performance yet the product is extremely affordable. It's one of those, 'most bang for your bucks' graphics cards. When you take that fact and a manufacturer like Prolink, which has a reputation for building high-quality and stylish designed graphics cards, well then, the end result must be staggering...
Today we test such a product. Prolink's PixelView GeForce FX 5900 XT Golden Limited with PDF II technology. Quite an interesting product I might add. A product of this caliber, in this price range (210 EUR), is just fantastic since you are looking at the same graphics core as the 5900/5950 Ultra series utilizes, just down-clocked a little plus slower clocked memory, which saves you some cash.
In this article we'll handle the entire enchilada. Technology overview, exotic photo shoot, benchmarks in various settings but the outcome of this product I can already give away to you... this is a fantastic product. Why? It's in the little details. Most graphics cards are all the same these days. Same reference design with a marginal frame per second difference, same price, same software bundle. And that's where ProLink diverts from the rest with their Golden Limited Edition, to set itself apart. First off, at the core we have the NVIDIA 5900 XT graphics processor running, then there is the stylish Blue PCB, aluminum alloy housing, extra DVI dongle, all the cables you'll need and of course a cooling solution that is just fantastic. The mystic PDF II fan technology is a combination of a LED and LCD. That LED illuminated fan is used to cool down the card. With PDF you can also read the GPU temperature and rotational speed of the fan. Series two of this technology will not only allow you to connect an additional fan to the device, but also to place the little LCD in a plastic cover and place it into your PC drive bay. You can also leave it on your graphics card yet now can be rotated. If you don't have a clue what I'm saying here... don't worry. We are going to show this to you.
At first sight you'll either love or hate the design, my bet is that most of you will fall in love with it on the spot. I sure did.
The PixelView GeForce FX 5900 XT Golden Limited is armed with a payload of 128 MB memory running steady at 700 MHz. The graphics core is running at the reference 390 MHz. In a later part of the review we'll show you that these values can be altered big time. Yes this card is an overclocker.
Interesting to see is that NVIDIA is competing with itself somehow. This product is in direct competition with the FX 5700 (Ultra). Performance wise this product will be quite a bit faster than the 5700 series yet only ~$20 USD more expensive. What makes this product so dominant over the 5700? Two primary reasons: It has 4 pixel pipelines with 2 Texture Memory Units per pipe where the 5700 has 4x1. Second it comes armed with 128 MB running over a wider 256-bit memory interface (compared to the 128-bit memory interface of the 5700), which guarantees higher computational bandwidth for its frame buffer. As stated the XT is a somewhat clocked down GeForce FX 5900/5950 Ultra, NVIDIA's previous flagship.
We are going to compare the card with almost all the other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. In both RAW and quality settings: 8x Anisotropic Filtering + Antialiasing at four levels we'll be testing the card with titles like Unreal 2004, Halo, Splinter Cell and much more, let's get it on!
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