Gigabyte FX 5900XT

The recent success of ATI's 9600XT series has, until now, put Nvidia into something of a spin. Its best budget offering, the Geforce FX 5700, never quite took off in the way Nvidia had hoped, which has led to the appearance of the Geforce 5900XT - essentially a cut-down version of its flagship FX 5900 Ultra.

Thankfully, Nvidia has designed its latest effort to offer the impressive performance the XT moniker implies.

The default 3Dmark 2001 benchmark at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 returned a healthy figure of 15,888. This compares favourably with the Asus Radeon 9600 XT we reviewed in January (p75), which managed just 13,406. Turning up the detail levels led to even more impressive results.

In the most punishing test we subjected it to, the FX 5900XT again displayed its superiority. At 1,600 x 1,200, with the maximum detail settings enabled, the card achieved a 3Dmark score of 2,811.

This performance is achieved mainly because Nvidia has used the same 256bit memory interface as seen in its 5900 Ultra GPU. Peak memory bandwidth has been reduced, but it is quick enough to match the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro in this area.

It may borrow the naming convention started by ATI, but the Geforce FX 5900XT is a good performer in its own right. If you want a cost-effective alternative to the 5900 Ultra, it is a good card at a decent price.

Contact: Gigabyte Technology 01908 362 700
www.gbt.co.uk

Specifications:

• 400MHz GPU core
• 700MHz memory core
• 128MB DDR memory
• Microsoft DirectX 9 support
• 256bit memory interface
• AGP 8x
• Peak memory bandwidth: 22.4Gbytes/sec