Page 1 - A GiGi Introduction

Albatron Gigi GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MBManufacturer: Albatron
MSRP: 199

Ever since they became a solid name on the market, we've been reviewing Albatrons products, and it has always been a pleasure. Today's review is no different. They have send in the new and strong product from NVIDIA, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. As you know Albatron has a certain way of making their product appealing for the consumer. Next to a quality built PCB, they always do stuff a little different. When you will see the first photo on the product you'll notice the nice blue PCB, really kick'ass 3-way cooling solution and ramsinks, guru3d.com stuff.

Today's review will reflect that experience, the product is their Gigi GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, armed with 128 MB DDR2 memory and a strong software bundle. But first let's have a little chat about the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra technology, also known under development codename NV36. On the 23rd of October NVIDIA launched two new products, both to be found in the mid- and high end range of products, respectively the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and the mid-range 5700 (Ultra). Both products are based on the NV3x generation, the 5950 had a small core clock and memory frequency increase, the 5700 however had slight design chances in it's chipset architecture.

I'll present you an overview of the new cards 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 setting 8x Anisotropic filtering + Anti aliasing at 4 levels. That's not it though, in the article we are going to compare the new cards with almost all other GeForce FX cards and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well. So this will be a very competitive review ...

The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra which is the follow-up of the FX 5600 Ultra and a product that is lined up against ATI's Radeon 9600 XT.  Right now, value for money wise, this will be the most interesting NVIDIA product for the most of you. It's affordable and it reminds me of the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 release two years ago. What NVIDIA did was clever, the 5700 Ultra got a really nice performance bump over the 5600 series, and it moves closer towards the high-end performing cards. Of course, it won't perform at that level, but what I thought was missing in the 5600 series this product is making up for it. In fact this product (as you will see) is closing in on Radeon 9700 Pro performance.