Gigabyte GV-NX57128D

Since the early 1990s when the PCI bus first found its way onto a motherboard, very little has changed inside your PC in terms of how your data moves. AGP and DDR were technologies developed to get around the limitations of the old PCI bus running at 33MHz (133Mbytes/sec of data). Now all is set to change with the introduction of PCI Express and the PCX 16x graphics slot which will provide bandwidth of around 4Gbytes/sec.

Based around Nvidia's Geforce PCX 5750 GPU (NV36 core), the GV-NX57128D from Gigabyte is the first PCX graphics card we have seen and is aimed at the lower end of the market.

On this card, the GPU is positioned further up the circuit board than on standard FX5700s just to make room for the HSI bridge (Nvidia's cards are not natively PCX and use a bridge instead). Apart from the HSI bridge, the specifications remain the same as the standard FX5700 with a 425MHz DDR core, a 128bit memory bus and 128MB of memory running at 550MHz DDR (1.1GHz). Because of these relatively low speeds there is no need for cooling.

Performance-wise the PCX interface offers no discernable advantage over the AGP version of the FX5700 - 3,206 for 3Dmark03 and 41.85fps in Far Cry when tested at 1,024 x 768 pixels, but it is early days.

Based on this, it's not really worth upgrading to PCX until much faster cards are launched.

Contact: Gigabyte
www.gigabyte.com

Specifications:

• 425MHz core
• 128MB of DDR memory running at 550MHz
• 128bit memory architecture
• 16x PCI Express interface
• DirectX 9