Albatron Gigi GeForce FX 5950 UV Ultra 256MB review

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Page 2 - Introducing GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
The 5950 Ultra is a slightly higher clocked product compared to the (NV35) GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. It still has the same NV35 architecture, it still has CineFX 2.0, IntelliSample HCT and UltraShadow techiques, but nothing new here feature wise. The most important change is the fact that the reference design of the product has a new cooling solution. On first sight a lot of you will get goosebumps and flashbacks to GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (often referred to as the leaf blower). Where NVIDIA flat-out goofed with the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (NV30) active cooling, this time they did something truly good. A cooling system that takes the air from the outside of the case, uses that air to cool the GPU and then exhaust that air into the PC.

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NVIDIA's reference cooling is huge (takes up AGP+PCI slot) and heavy, but does an excellent job. Albatron however decided to do things a bit different. Armed with their new Wise Fan Technology they where able to design a single slot solution, this card only uses up the AGP port. In all honesty, the cooling solution is extremely close to the first PCI slot and it can still hinder a card that needs to be inserted in that spot.

One of the most interesting things about this card is it's cooling solution, Albatron calls it their 'Wise Fan technology' which is all about redundancy. Basically it'll work like this: two working fans on the sink are active one fan is deactivated and functions as a spare fan which turns on when one of the other two stops.

As you can guess, 130 million transistors running at 475 MHz produce heat, and this is really cool, the third fan will enable itself when the chip is getting too hot at a threshold temperature of 56°C, as far as I could see the cooler has its own little sensor build in that is not related towards the temperature sensor built into the graphics core. And yes it works good. With three fans active and the graphics card at 100% load we saw heat peaks of 60 Degrees C. Computer components tend to get more hot these days, a lot more then a few years ago.

Monitoring with our own thermal probe the third fan indeed becomes active when you reach ~57 Degrees C. We also halted one of the fans with my finger and as soon as that happens the third fan will kick in. Despite the fact it's using three fans I have to state that it's not noisy at all. In fact it does not produce more sound than one common Graphics Card fan. Oh and one other cool item I need to mention when we are talking about the wisefan technology is a little blue LED that is emitting light as soon as the PC starts up. Have a look at the image below, now isn't that a pretty sight to look at ?

      Albatron GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

  Codename NV38
Core Clock 475 MHz Memory Clock 475 MHz (x2) Memory Interface 256-bit DDR Frame Buffer Size 256 MB Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 30.4 Fill Rate (texels/sec) 3.8 Billion Vertices/sec 356 Million Thermal Silent, single-slot Fansink    Guru3D.com  

           

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