Prolink PixelView GeForce FX 5700 review - Page 2 - Introducing GeForce FX 5700

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 12/24/2003 09:00 AM [ ] 0 comment(s)

The Product
The GeForce FX 5700 (Ultra) has basically a slightly altered NV35 (GeForce FX 5900) graphics core and is armed with two pixel shader engines and a new geometry engine which makes it an even more competitive product with ATI's Radeon 9600 XT. The architecture did not change extremely, though, it's still based on the NV35, however, with 4 pixel pipelines, and a 130nm core as it's base of operations. This is the product that was manufactured at IBM. The product has more vertex processing power compared to the GeForce FX 5600, and is capable of handling DDR1/DDR2 and GDDR3 when needed.

The card is covered with Prolinks new cooling solution, again very silent with it's Noise Reduction Technology (around 25dB) and yet very effective. The cooling solution is designed to prevent air being blocked by other PCI card.

The solid gold colored sink covers the graphics core and memory 100%, the backside is cooled by a metal plate. The fan on the front has a variable RPM, this means the hotter the card is getting the faster it'll spin. The cooling solution has a temperature diode built in. When the GPU fan speed is below 1000RPM or it's temperature is higher than 70 Degrees C an audio alarm will be turned on automatically.

Hold on a second .... yeah that audio alarm works !

Just halted the fan from rotating. Speaking of the fan, to spice things up a bit more a blue LED is emitting light from it. Same thing happens on the LCD display. That LCD Display is also called 'Blue Icy Crystal Displayer' and you can read the graphics core temperature and fan speed (RPM) from it. What a really awesome design.

Memory and core, the core is now at a very impressive 425 MHz where the memory is doing 600 (2x 600) MHz. That means good computational power and very decent memory bandwidth for a mid-range product. Interesting fact is that this product has been equipped with 256 MB of DDR memory, it's 128-bit though. The product will be available in the stores by next month. The product will have a ~ 199 USD pricetag and will be competing mostly with ATI's Radeon 9600 series.

In the box we'll find the Prolink FX 5700 equipped with 256MB memory, AGP x8/x4/x2 interface, this product has a 128-bit memory bus. Furthermore it sports D-Sub, TV-in/out and DVI Ports. It has a traditional colored PCB PDF cooling solution. Looking at the cards layout I would say the board is 100% based on NVIDIA's reference design.

Mounted into the heatsink we can notice a nice decorative bright blue LEDs which emits light to it's ambient surroundings. The cooling solution is downright nice, and also very important silent, the PCI slot below the graphics card is completely free to use. On the back we can see one heatsink over each pair of the memory chips.

The Bundle
In the box we'll find a the following software: CD with driver software and optional PowerDirector ME and WinDVD 4 from InterVideo. Nothing too flashy, Powercolor clearly is willing to keep the price down by excluding lots of extra software.

The Installation
It's really not hard to install a graphics card yourself nowadays. Especially with brands like ATI and NVIDIA who use unified driver sets. If you have a really new product then make sure you have the latest drivers on your HD. First uninstall your current graphics cards drivers carefully, this is very important especially if the older graphics was from a different chipset manufacturer. Now power down the PC and pull out the power cable. Insert the graphics card in the slot, secure it with a screw, connect the monitor and boot up windows, run the driver installation, then restart and you are set to go. That's all. Also important, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX (9) installed.

Below you can notice the differences between the FX 5700 and the FX 5700 Ultra model. There's quite a big difference in memory bandwidth that will definitely demand its toll.

Let's calculate memory bandwidth:

(2x128bit) x (600MHz:2) : 8bit = 9600 MB/sec which is 4800 MB/sec less then the Ultra model.

GeForce FX 5700

Codename	NV36 (Ultra)	NV36
Core Clock	475 MHz	425
Memory Clock	450 MHz	300
Memory Interface	128-bit DDR2	128-bit DDR
Frame Buffer Size	128 MB	256 MB
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	14.4	9.6
Vertices/sec	356 Million	336
Thermal	Silent, single-slot Fansink	Silent, single-slot Fansink

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