PNY Geforce FX 5800 Ultra

It's taken quite a while, but Nvidia's Geforce FX graphics chip has finally arrived in our labs. Nvidia claims that this, its answer to ATI's DirectX 9 (DX9) Radeon 9700, will be the "dawn of cinematic computing".

It's quite a bold claim, but, taking into account the quoted specifications, the chip could almost live up to it.

This 125-million transistor GPU is the first to be clocked at 500MHz - until now, the fastest was 325MHz. It's the memory that's more impressive though, running at 1GHz, (or 500MHz DDR). Matrox's Parhelia card is the only one to come close at 800MHz.

It's packed with 128MB of DDR 2 memory - the first CPU or GPU chip to use this new technology. The more vital improvement, though, is the 0.13micron process that Nvidia has used to make the chip; ATI cards are currently stuck at 0.15microns.

Shrinking it down means the chip consumes less power and, due to the distance signal has to travel inside the chip, runs faster. However, the FX still requires a standard power connector, as well as the wattage supplied by the AGP bus.

The FX is unsurprisingly fully DX9 compatible, yet Nvidia has made a few enhancements on top. In particular, the vertex shaders from DX9 have been enhanced, so shading is by vertex, as opposed to by object.

It's also capable of 65,536 instructions; DirectX 9 only requires a comparatively weak 1,024.

Finally, it's also capable of 128bit precision. If we're totally honest, though, we couldn't notice any particular difference in any of today's games or tests, but that's not to say that in the future the FX won't shine.

These leaps in technology cause a good few problems though. First, it's massive, taking up two bays on the back of your PC because of the immense cooling fan that sits on top of the GPU. The fan sucks in air from one side of the metal plate and blows it out the other.

While this is an improvement on the design Abit uses in its OTES cards, and despite Nvidia's claims that it is supposed to run hot, we weren't particularly pleased when it burnt our fingers.

The copper heatsink that surrounds both GPU and memory was too hot to touch after 10 minutes of even non-3D usage.

Third, and most importantly, the fan makes such a racket that it's clearly audible through casing, and about 10 yards away; it's really that loud.

Luckily, the fan isn't always this loud as it only switches to Dyson-mode when producing 3D graphics. Even in quiet mode, though, it's louder than anything else on the market.

With earplugs in, we proudly ploughed our way through our 3D tests. The FX 5800 Ultra was run on a 2.8GHz P4 on an 845 chipset with 512MB of DDR memory and on an Athlon 3000+ with an Nforce2 and 512MB of memory.

The results attained in 3Dmark are the fastest on the market, but only by a hair's breadth, reaching 13,349 on the P4 and a record breaking 16,154 on the Athlon platform.

Results with full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) still win over the competition. But when we ran Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1,024 x 768, we were mightily disappointed.

ATI's Radeon 9700 was more than four frames faster in the botmatch test; very much unexpected considering the chip's specification. When we upped the ante, running it at 1,600 x 1,200 with FSAA and AF on their highest settings, the FX just won over the 9700.

As you can currently buy a 9700 Pro for £220, just over half of this monster's asking price, £400 for this behemoth really doesn't make this an attractive buy.

However, as with many high-end cards, there is precious little in the way of games, or even benchmarks, that can fully show off what this chip is capable of.

It's very much possible that the Geforce FX will shine in the future, but at the moment, and at this price, it's hard to recommend.

Contact: Dabs
www.dabs.com/pny

Specifications

• 500MHz core, 128bit DDR GPU
• 500MHz DDR2 memory clock
• 128MB DDR2 memory
• DVI, VGA and S-Video outputs
• OpenGL 1.3 and DirectX 9 compliant
• AGP 2x, 4x and 8x compatible