Abit Siluro 5900 Otes

With testosterone-inducing looks, Abit's Siluro FX5900 is not a graphics accelerator for the faint hearted. Using the company's Outside Thermal Exhaust System (Otes) first pioneered with the Geforce4 TI, the Siluro is endowed with one of the most extravagant cooling structures yet conceived.

While the unique exhaust system, or beetle tube, looks like something straight out of science fiction, it is, according to Abit, grounded in science fact. The Otes acts according to Bernoulli's principle of velocity and pressure to draw heat away from the card. As with the majority of Geforce FX5900 cards, this one occupies two expansion slots. However, given the size of the heatsink and fan, you may wish to leave the third PCI slot free to give it extra room.

Aesthetics and mass aside, the Siluro is a piece of kit aimed at serious gamers. The 0.13micron Siluro's 400MHz GPU is coupled with 128MB of DDR memory running at 850MHz. It can also be overclocked to quite obscene levels, taking heat accumulation in its stride. Even as standard though, this is a card that won't hesitate to throw polygons around, achieving an excellent 16,673 in 3Dmark and 75fps in Unreal Tournament tests.

The Silruo also comes with VGA, DVI and TV-out connectors, as well as a selection of adaptors and cables. Given the reasonable price, even if you're not into overclocking, this is pretty good value for a 5900 card.

Contact: Abit 01438 228 888
www.abit-usa.com

Specifications:

• 400MHz GPU core
• 850MHz memory core
• 128MB DDR memory
• Microsoft DirectX 9 support
• NTSC/Pal TV-encoder
• AGP 8x