Gigabyte GeForce PCX 5900 Video Card Review
Author:
Date: 04.08.2004 |
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Introduction
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Gigabyte GeForce PCX5900
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| GPU chip |
NV35 (0.13) |
| Memory |
128 Mb; DDR 256-bit;
Hynix 2.8 ns |
| Frequencies: |
350MHz/275MHz(550MHzDDR) |
| Bus: |
PCI-Express x16 |
| Category: |
Middle-End |
| Price: |
$220 |
The first half of 2004 for NVIDIA turned out to be definitely successful. All started with the presentation of the new series of NV4х (GeForce 6 Series) graphic processors where NVIDIA virtually shattered the whole IT industry and shocked the reviewers by the outstanding potentials and truly revolutionary novelties in the graphic processor architecture and its specifications.
That immediately gained confirmation in practice. That was a really tremendous gap between the previous-generation high-end solutions, impressive performance virtually everywhere - in the synthetics, which fans of benchmarking took immediate advantages, at gaming applications which made gamers seriously think of the budget of the next year on the matter of buying such a tempting product.
Of course, high-end solutions, however attractive they looked, have always had and will have an outstanding price. That is quite logical and justified.
But what to do if "you want to have it, but can't afford"?
And there it goes! Some time after the first presentation where GeForce 6800Ultra and GeForce 6800 were presented, NVIDIA releases GeForce 6800GT, a solution with the nominal frequencies downstated relative to 6800Ultra, 16 pipelines and, thus, considerably reduced price.
That changed the alignment of forces completely, and while formerly X800 PRO had been confident at surpassing GeForce 6800 non Ultra, then it came up against a more serious rival - 6800GT, so NVIDIA made an extremely successful marketing move and brought a big gift to the consumers.
Now regarding those gifts from NVIDIA.
This suggests the analogy - some time before that the release of video cards on the GeForce FX5900 XT chip made on the NV35 graphic chip proved a gift as well. The board offered a PCB design simplified relative to FX5900, 128 MB of video memory and reduced frequencies.
The release of boards proved to be truly a hit in the respective pricing sector of the market and a favorite product of overclockers.
That is already a thing of the past. But the progress does not stand still. Soon PCI-Express solutions will flood the market, and the consumer will stop treating the HSI bridge like a strange and rare novelty. "Regulars" at hardware conferences will instruct freshers and argue with each other as to which is better - MSI or Abit, Gigabyte or Leadtek - bringing in irrefutable evidence like "I was able to overclock it to ***/*** ".
But for now our task is to describe it to the full what will be installed in your computer in a few months/half a year/a year.
Today, we are presenting GeForce PCX5900, the PCI-Express "reincarnation" of the NV35 chip (GeForce FX5900) equipped with the AGP - PCI-Express bridge.
The manufacturer of the card in question is Gigabyte, widely known on the market of graphic accelerators. PCX5900 is far not the first "joint" product of Gigabyte and NVIDIA. As we can judge for ourselves, this time the "cooperation" of companies proved to be very successful. Let's better not run ahead, but tell about the rivals.
You have already come across the two of them - MSI GeForce PCX5750 and MSI RX600XT - in our previous review, and GeCube RX600 PRO, most interesting in all the respects, will be presented to you in one of the forthcoming materials.
Now let's move on to examining the PCX5900.
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