Club3D Geforce FX 5900XT - New King of the budget class?

Videocards/VGA Reviews by piotke @ 2004-01-23

nVidia pulled a surprising videocard out of its hat: the FX5900XT. A lower clocked FX 5900 with a very attractive price, can it be crowned as "king of the budget-class"? Find out in this review where we pit it against the popular GF4 Ti4200.

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Continued & Test setup

Cooling

The cooling on this VGA card has a big wow-factor. Great design, nice ram sinks, ...

When you're working in windows, using non-3d applications, the fan on this video card is silent. But as soon as you start gaming, or using 3d applications, the fan starts to spin faster and thus become louder. Not extremely loud, just louder.

But, when you stop using 3d, the fan doesn't slow down, only after a reboot.


Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)

Madshrimps (c)

Click the images for larger picture

Madshrimps (c)


This card has also an integrated temperature sensor:


Madshrimps (c)


Test system

Test setup
CPU Penium 4 2.4 GHz @ 275 fsb (3.3 Ghz)
Mainboard Asus p4c800
Memory2*256 pc3200
Hard diskSeagate Barracuda 5 80 Gig


I borrowed a Geforce 4 ti4200 for comparison. Why this card? Just after I bought the card I posted some first results on a Dutch forum. Most reactions come from people who had a GF4 ti4x00 and were wondering if this card was worth the upgrade...

The benchmarks I ran:

  • 3D Mark 2001 se
  • 3D Mark 2003
  • Aquamark 3
  • Call of Duty

    For Call of Duty, I played the same map every time and used Fraps to analyse my fps. You have to know that these results aren't 100% correct, as you can't play the same map exactly the same again. That's why I didn't include my Need For Speed underground benches. When you for example create a lot of smokes with your tires your fps will drop immediately. As the results from this game were thereby too different between runs, I didn't include them.

    So this leaves us with some very basic benchmarks, but good enough for a general impression.
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