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The GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128 is
built upon MSI's signature bright-red PCB. Aside from
the PCB color and ViVo functionality, however, the board
itself adheres to NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900 XT reference
design. With the XT, NVIDIA redesigned the original
GeForce FX 5900 PCB slightly, which makes the them a bit
more economical to reproduce. The board is also
slightly shorter than the original FX 5900...
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The MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128 |
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Up
Close & Personal |
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MSI's GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128,
as the name implies, is equipped with 128MB of DDR RAM
clocked at 350MHz (700MHz DDR), the core incidentally is
clocked at 400MHz. All eight of the
Samsung K4D263238E-GC2A memory chips populating the
board are mounted to the front of the PCB, without any
heatsinks or specialized cooling. The memory remained
relatively cool throughout testing and overclocked fairly
well though, so it seems specialized memory coolers are not
a necessity in this case. The GPU, however, is
outfitted with a mid-sized copper heatsink / fan combo that,
according to MSI, will keep to core up to 8°C cooler than
NVIDIA's standard reference design. MSI's heatsink /
fan combo is also very quiet, producing 28db of noise or
less - it was essentially inaudible when the fans on our CPU
and in our power supply were spinning. We removed the
two clips holding the cooler in place, and found an adequate
application of thermal paste had been applied to the GPU.
The rest of the board's attributes are standard fare, with a
four-pin Molex power connector at its rear, and DVI, DB15
and Video-In/Out connectors located on the external plate.
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Bundled Software: Intervideo WinDVD Creator |
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DVD
Authoring |
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The MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128
is equipped with a Philips IC that gives the card its
Video-In / Video-Out (ViVo) capabilities. Standard WDM
drivers are used, so virtually any Windows video editing &
capture program should work with the card. However, to
give users the ability to take advantage of the
FX5900XT-VTD128's ViVo features without having to purchase
new software, MSI included a few useful utilities and
applications. The most notable of which is Intervideo's
WinDVD creator. With WinDVD creator, users can Capture, Edit
and Author video clips using a single, relatively simple
interface. WinDVD creator also enables users to burn their
movies directly to DVD. The screen shots above represent
WinDVD Creator's "Capture", "Edit" and "Author" menus. As
you can see, the interface is very straightforward, and
should be manigable for anyone familiar to working with this
type of timeline-driven video editing application.
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In-Game Screenshots |
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FarCry |
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1024x768 - 4X AA - 8X
ANISOTROPIC FILTERING
We spent some quality time
gaming with the MSI GeForce FX5900XT-VTD128 before putting
it through the wringer with our suite of game benchmarks.
The screen shots posted above are from Ubisoft's recently
released tactical shooter, FarCry. As you can see, the
game looks great, except for a weird lighting problem with
the trees off in the distance in the third shot. There
seems to be a bug in either NVIDIA's drivers, or the game
itself that causes some trees to blend nicely into the fog,
while others are too bright and stick out like a sore thumb.
We also did some gaming with Unreal Tournament 2004 and our
enduring favorite NFS: Underground. With the screen
resolution set to 1024x768, we enabled 4X Anti-Aliasing with
8X Anisotropic filtering and enjoyed a few hours of gaming.
For the most part, frame rates were great, especially with
UT2004 and NFSU, but FarCry was a bit too demanding.
With AA and Aniso enabled, FarCry would slow down
significantly in some sections, so we'd recommend disabling
those features with this game - at least until N40 and R420
arrive!
The Test System &
Some Benchmarks
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