Meeting - Gainward (1)
GainwardWe will now slowly start the 'pictorial part' of this article. You'll see a lot of photo's regarding graphics cards. First stop Gainward, where I met Aline Guillot. First an insider only statement, yes Wayne .. you where right. She really is looking far more pretty than you are :)
Right that said, Gainward was of course showing off the new GeForce FX line-up of products ranging from the 5200, to 5600 towards the 5800 Ultra. All boards look good, traditional design though. Good cooling fan and some of them ramsinks. I've been trying to discuss the prices a bit, but it was a tad fuzzy. Not a problem, we'll look up and post the press-release later on.
The Geforce FX 5800 Ultra you can see on the photo's below really is a nice package. It includes a 40 DB cooling solution which is a tad more quiet compared to the reference design from nvidia and it should not have that high-pitched sound level. The 5800 Ultra package also includes a digital video-in IEEE 1394 FireWire daughter card, a high quality 5.1 sound card with both stereo output and optical SP/DIF output connectors. When I asked why they include this with a graphics card they answer with a very logical response .. people really seem to like it and overall costs really are not that much higher. So that's a very nice option from a marketing point of view to sell the product that way. More for the same or a tiny bit more money ? Who does not want that ?
Aline - she will probably hate me now for posting this image ;)
This is the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra - the active cooling solution is about 40db and unfortunately takes up a PCI and AGP slot.
Backside, copper fansink that covers GPU and memory.
GeForce FX 5200
GeForce FX 5600 and Ultra model