Product: Prolink PixelView GeForce FX 5700 with PDF
Manufacturer: Prolink
MSRP: € 199
With the amount of graphics card reviews that I do each year it's quite a difficult task to surprise me and make me say 'ooh, now that's nice'. It happened to me a while ago when I received a press-release from our friends at Prolink. You know, most graphics card PCB's these days are 99% the same. Performance therefore at exactly the same level also. Little differences that we need to be weary off, can be found in the little details like a slightly different clock frequency for the graphics core, faster/slower rated memory, the software bundle, little extra's DVI dongles and of course, it's cooling solution. The past year or two we clearly have noticed that innovative cooling solutions are become a trend. With a cooling solution you can set yourself at a different level compared to the competition. I mean, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, Hercules, Albatron Gainward, Prolink .. they all try to differentiate themselves from each other. Prolink however did something new in this genre and developed something mysterious called PDF.
That last word of the previous sentence is what this Prolink PixelView card is all about, whether there would be a GeForce FX 5200 or 5600 hidden in that package you almost don't care as this is pure beauty to look at. Fortunately there's a GeForce FX 5700 (codename NV36) under the hood armed with no less than 256 MB memory. So, today's product we are going to review is the Prolink GeForce FX 5700 armed with video in/out, 256 MB memory and a sub 25dB cooling solution which is equipped with something that is called PDF, no no .. not the Adobe one, it's called Plasma Display Fan. I hear you say .. 'Say waah ?' Hey don't ask me either .. plasma ?
The PDF is a combination of a LED and LCD. And 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. Pretty interesting stuff huh ?
Armed with 256 MB DDR memory and a simple software bundle Prolink is making a daring yet interesting move here, and I like that in a manufacturer. But first let's have a little chat about the GeForce FX 5700 technology, also known under development codename NV36. On the 23rd of October NVIDIA launched two new products, both to be found in the mid- and high end range of products, respectively the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the mid-range 5700 (Ultra). Both products are based on the NV3x generation, the 5950 had a small core clock and memory frequency increase, the 5700 however had slight design changes in it's chipset architecture.
In today's article I'll present you an overview of the 5700 with the help of a nice photo shoot, overview of the ForceWare drivers and then of course we'll dig into our benchmark suite where we have tested the card in both RAW and quality setting 8x Anisotropic filtering + Anti aliasing at four levels. That's not it though, in the article we are going to compare the new cards with almost all other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. So this will be a very competitive review ...
The GeForce FX 5700 is the follow-up of the somewhat disappointing FX 5600 series and a product that is lined up against ATI's Radeon 9600 XT. Right now, value for money wise, the 5700 and the new 5900XT series will be the most interesting NVIDIA products for the most of you. I
Let's get started.
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