Page 2 - Technology, in the box and Installation
The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra has basically a slightly altered NV35 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 Albatron's new cooling solution, again very silent and yet very effective, the solid metal sink covers the graphics core and memory. Speaking about memory and core, the clock frequencies have been moved up by quite a bit. The core is now at a very impressive 475 MHz where the memory is doing 900 (2x 450) MHz. That means more computational power and very decent memory bandwidth for a mid-range product. Interesting fact is that this product has been equipped with 128 MB of DDR2 memory, it's 128-bit though. The product will be available in the stores by next month. The product will have a very interesting 199 USD pricetag and will be competing mostly with ATI's Radeon 9600 series.
The Product
In the box we'll find the Albatron Gigi GeForce FX 5700 Ultra equipped with 128MB AGP x8/x4/x2 interface, 128 MB DDR-II SDRAM memory in 8 chips on both PCB sides. The memory on the product is in fact Samsung (GDDR2) 2.2ns memory chips which equals to 450 (900) MHz, the cards memory is memory is clocked at 450 (900) MHz, the GPU at 475 MHz, this product has a 128 bit memory bus. Furthermore it sports D-Sub, TV-out and DVI Ports. Although the colorful PCB, ramsinks and cooling solution would suggest otherwise the board is 100% based on NVIDIA's reference design.One of the more interesting things of this card is the cooling solution, Albatron calls it their 'Wise Fan II technology'. Basically it'll work like this: two working fans on the sink are active one fan is deactivated and functions as a spare fan which turns on when one of the other two stops. Also and this is really cool, the third fan will enable itself when the chip is getting hot at a temperature of 56°C, as far as I could see the cooler has its own little sensor build in that is not related towards the temperature sensor built into the graphics core.
Mounted into the heatsink we can notice a nice decorative bright blue LED which emits light to it's ambient surroundings. The cooling solution is very nice, also it's small in size, the PCI slot below the graphics card is completely free to use. On the back we can see two heatsinks on each pair of the memory chips.
The Bundle
In the box we'll find a very nice selection of software: CD with driver software, WinDVD Creator edit software + WinDVD player, Duke Nuke'em Manhattan Project, and a CD with 5 demo versions of games. Besides software we'll find a good Manual, SVideo-to-RCA adapter, TV-out extenders cables. All in all a good package. Oh and I have say this, the box itself looks fantastic. It's kind of embossed, what a cool design.
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, 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.
| Core Clock | 475 MHz | |||||||
