Sparkle Geforce FX 5700 Ultra Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by Gamer @ 2004-01-16

We take a look at the Sparkle FX5700Ultra Platinum edition (SP8836U-PT), it improves upon nVidia's FX 5600 Ultra, while sporting ViVo features. Pitting it against the Radeon 9800 Pro to see how it holds up in popular benchmarks and games!

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Benchmarks

Test Setup


Gamers' Test Setup
CPU Intel P4 3.0 "C"
Mainboard Asus P4C800
Cooling nVentiv Prometeia Mach I
Memory 2 * 512Mb OCZ PC4200 Premier
Video * nVidia Geforce FX5700 Ultra
* ATI Radeon 9800 Pro


The FX will be put up against one of the most powerful video cards man can buy. The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is an extremely fast video card, able to deliver stunning performance in all games out there. Its major drawback is the stiff price, the FX5700Ultra costs only halve, is its performance also cut in halve? Let us find out

Overclocking

This Sparkle FX showed some headroom in the overclocking department, with the default cooling we were able to push the GPU from its default 475 to 580Mhz (+22%) and the memory up 1080, coming from 900Mhz (exactly +20%). To find out what difference this overclock could make we included overclocked results in the synthetic benchmarks.



Synthetic Benchmarks

We start of with a very well know DirectX 8 one: Futuremark's 3DMark2001 SE

*FX5700Ultra: 15033
*FX5700Ultra OC: 16049
*R9800 Pro: 17907

The tests in detail show you that lobby and car high are both CPU limited, while the Nature test improves up to 19% when the FX is overclocked.

Madshrimps (c)


In 3DMark2001 the FX is lagging behind by ~19%, while increasing its GPU/Memory speed gives you a 6% speed increase overall, not noticeable in games but this make the 5700 only 15% slower!

Next up was Futuremark's DirectX 9 benchmark: 3DMark03

*FX5700Ultra: 4221
*FX5700Ultra OC: 4852
*R9800 Pro: 5859

The 9800 Pro increases its lead in this DX9 benchmark up to ~40%, overclocking does pay off here as it gives you a nice 15% increase average over the Game tests:

Madshrimps (c)



Going more synthetic:

*Fillrate

Madshrimps (c)


*Advanced 3DMark03 tests

Madshrimps (c)


As with the game tests we see the R9800Pro dominating the field, but if you look closely at the last graph you'll notice something different, the Vertex Shader on the FX5700Ultra is outperforming that of the ATI!


Aquamark3

A DX9 benchmark that which is growing in popularity:

Madshrimps (c)


Overclocking this video card will give you noticeable results in DirectX9 games, the Aquamark scores increases with ~20% making this card only 20% slower then ATI 9800 Pro.


Let's see how the FX performs in UT2003 and Halo ->

The card performs well in Aquamark 03.
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