VGA Roundup

Review Pages

1. Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate
2. Exair Radeon 9800 XT
3. Asus V9950 FX 5900 GE
4. Exair GeForce FX 5900 XT
5. Test specifications
6. 3DMark Benchmark tests
7. Aquamark3 Benchmark tests
8. Codecreatures Benchmark tests
9. GL Excess Benchmark tests
10. Farcry & Painkiller tests
11. Unreal Tournament 2004 & 2003 tests
12. Halo & Tomb Raider:AOD tests
13. Overclocking
14. Conclusion

ASUS V9950 FX 5900 GE 128MB

Although Asus' 5900 VGA card has been released on the market a long time time ago, it is still one of the top FX models based on the NV35 GPU currently available. So, even for comparison reasons the V9950 is a good reference. We have in our hands the V9950 FX 5900 Gamer Edition. Although this card belongs to the previous generation, in this review you will also be able to see the card's performance in the latest cutting edge games.

- Specifications

GPU	GEFORCE FX 5900 (NV 35)
Memory Bus Width	128MB DDR MEMORY
Memory interface	256 Bit DDR
Memory Type	BGA DDR2
Core Clock	400 MHz
Memory Clock	700 Mhz (2x350)
Memory Bandwidth	22.4 GB/sec
Pixel FillRate	3.2 Gpixels/sec
Geometry rate	300 Mtriangles/sec
Bus	8x/4x/2x AGP
Processing technology	0.13µ
Output Connections	VGA + TV + DVI
Cooling	single-slot Fansink
2D Display 32 bit Resolutions & Hz	640x480@240, 800x600@240, 1024x768@200, 1152x864@170, 1280x1024@150, 1600x1200@100, 1920x1440@75, 2048x1536@60
3D Maximum resolution	2048x1536 with 16.7M colors
Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF)	2x/4x/8x
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) modes	1x/2x/4x/6x/8x
Dual Display	Supported
Pipelines	4
Texture units per pixel pipeline	2
Technologies supported	- Intellisample HCT is a new compression scheme for better compression at high resolutions with Anti-Aliasing. - UltraShadow Technology enables a Higher Quality and cinematic experience in games - CineFX 2.0 Engine delivers cinema-quality video to your PC - LMA II contains a lossless form of Z-compression, saving memory bandwidth for higher performance
Pixel Shader Support	2.0+
Vertex Shader Support	2.0+
DTV/HDTV decoding	Supported
System requirements	The recommended system requirements for the card and complementary software: - PC with Pentium 4 / III 450 MHz or AMD Athlon processor with AGP 4x/8x universal slot -64MB of system memory -8x speed CD-ROM drive, DVD playback requires DVD drive - Windows 2000, 98SE, ME, XP and DirectX 9.0 - Microsoft DirectX 3.0 compatible sound card

- 3D Mark detailed specifications

- The chipset

With that golden fan the card looks really nice. Also two golden heatsinks cover the DDR2 memories.

After removing the peachy fan, the two memory heatsinks and the heat paste conductor we were able to see the following:

Asus V9950 GeForce 5900 exposed for your eyes only.

Back side

A closer look at the "brain" of the card,

and the memories. Samsung as usual.

As you can see from above, the Asus FX 5900 is equipped with the following outputs: one VGA, one DVI, and one video out.

- The package

The software bundle contains several tools: ASUS Tweak (overclocking), ASUS SmartDoctor (hardware monitoring), ASUS Video Security, Digital VCR and ASUS Live Update. The card also includes the ASUS DVD XP v4.0 DVD player software and the ASUS GameFace for real-time video/audio communication.

The gaming bundle is a great variety of last year's great games and it's consisted of "Gunmetal" (2003), "Battle Engine Aquila" (2003) and "Delta Force - Black Hawk Down" (2003). A compact disk with the latest gaming demos ("Splinter Cell," "Warcraft III," "Big Mutha Truckers," "Breed," "Colin McRae Rally 3," "Toca Race Driver") is also included. The greatest variety of software we have ever seen.