Chaintech has been working hard on their imago, with a goal set to please the hardware enthusiast. It comes to no surprise that they included nVidia’s best price/performance ratio GPU in their video card line-up, the FX 5900XT.



The aptly named SA5900X is their entry in the budget video card segment of the market, since the GPU and PCB layout is pretty much the same on all 3rd party boards, it mostly comes down to features, cooling, overclocking potential and included goodies, when trying to find a winner.



The Chaintech takes a great start in the goodies department, you will find all the cables included to hook it up to your D-sub monitor or DVI TFT, further more you’ll find 2 different cables for TV-out and a Y-splitter for giving the card its needed juice.



The card is an exact copy of the nVidia reference card, except for the cooling, Chaintech’s solution is very good looking and if you have a side windows in your case it will surely stand out! The little cooler pushed quite a bit of air, but unfortunately makes a lot of noise too.



The memory chips used are from Hynix and according this table from OC.com.tw translate into 2.8ns or 350Mhz.



Which brings us to the card's specifications:

Clocks speeds Standard (2d mode):

Core clock: 300 Mhz

Memory clock: 350 Mhz (700 Mhz)

Clock speeds Performance (3d mode):

Core clock: 390 Mhz

Memory clock: 350 Mhz (700 Mhz)

Features:

256-bit chip technology

0.13 Micron Process

256-bit DDr Memory Bus

AGP Bus 2*/4*/8*

128 Mb Memory

Nvidia© Ultrashadow™ technology

Nvidia© CineFX™ 2.0 Engine

Nvidia© Intellisample technology

Nvidia© Nview™ multi-display technology

Nvidia© Digital Vibrance Control 3.0

Supports Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0

128-bit, studio-precision colour

Vertex Shader 2.0+

Pixel Shader 2.0+

Dual 400Mhz RAMDACs allow you to hook up 2 monitors and the card also supports high resolution HDTV decoding.

On the software side of things you get 3 applications, 1 full game (MDK2) and 5 game demos, a more detailed line-up on the next page ->