Page 1 - A Heavenly Introduction

Name: Galaxy Zeus 5900 XT
Description: GeForce FX 5900 XTInfo: Galaxy Technology
Price: ~210 EUR

In a galaxy far, far away .. ehm, now wait a minute Hilbert, wasn't that from some sort of movie? Yeah true ... but the company who's product we are testing is named after it. Well, not after the movie ... but Galaxy. 

Yes guys and gals, recently we got acquainted with a somewhat new Hong Kong based company. This manufacturer makes really nice graphics cards and therefore I definitely wanted them on our review list. Galaxy Technology in fact is a certified NVIDIA Board Partner and as stated is stationed in Hong Kong. Galaxy Technology is manufacturing high performance graphic cards such as the GeForce FX 5900 XT, FX 5700, FX 5600 XT, FX 5200, Personal Cinema and much more. They carry the brand names 3G Graphics and Zeus and have branches in the Europe and Asia regions, so they provide global channel coverage.

In today's latest 3D graphics technology review we are focused on the great GeForce FX 5900 XT. The product is called the ZEUS 5900 XT, which is equipped with a nice cooling solution, ramsinks and 128 MB DDR memory from Hynix rated at 2.6ns. Hynix these days means overclocking :)

Right, I'm going slightly on a side-track now, follow me please. It's so funny how graphics card manufacturers are always relating to Greek gods and mystic titles. It's like it is almost becoming an unwritten rule or something.  Let's see if you recognize a few alright?:  Prophet (Hercules), Maya (Gigabyte), Atlantis (Sapphire), Medusa (Albatron), Excalibur (HiS) and AOpen with its Greek god of the winds, Aeolus.

Now we can add Galaxy to that list:

Main Entry: Zeus
Pronunciation Key: zs
n. Greek Mythology
Etymology: The principal god of the Greek pantheon, ruler of the heavens, and father of other gods and mortal heroes.

As stated the GeForce FX 5900 XT is the product for today. Quite an interesting product I might add, as 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, just down-clocked a little + slower clocked memory and that creates value.

What's more interesting is that 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 is primarily due to two reasons: First of all it has 4 pixel pipelines with 2 TMUs per pipe where the 5700 has 4x1.

Next to that it is armed with 128 MB running over fast a 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 slowed down GeForce FX 5900/5950 Ultra, NVIDIA's current flagship. The differences can be found on core and memory clockspeed and that results in true value.

The GeForce FX 5900 series are produced around a GPU that is profiled as a Cinematic GPU that is capable of bringing cinematic visual effects on your PC with the combination of some brutal power and an excellent feature set. The CineFX GPU is of course capable of utilizing DirectX 9 Pixel Shaders 2.0+, Vertex Shaders 2.0+ and OpenGL. Basically this product is in the high-end range and offers, with 4 pixel pipelines x 2 TMUs per pipe, a lot of gaming pleasure.

In today's article I'll present you with an overview of the 5900 XT 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 settings: 8x Anisotropic Filtering + Antialiasing at four levels. We are going to compare the new card with almost all the other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. We'll be testing the card with titles like Unreal 2004, Halo, FireStarter, Splinter Cell, Call of Duty and more ..

Galaxy Zeus 5900 XT