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The
GeForce FX lineup |
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NVIDIA's jolly green giants |
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Chaintech's Apogee AA5700U
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ENLARGED VIEW
We have
historically been impressed with Chaintech's attention to
detail, and the AA5700U was no
exception. The AA5700U was quite hefty, weighed down by the
large copper heatsinks placed on both sides of the card.
These heatsinks help cool not only the GPU, but are
sandwiched firmly around the RAM as well. Normally, DDR-II
RAM runs a bit hotter than standard DDR, so the solid
copper should help keep it cool. The AA5700U is
also one of the
longest cards we have had in the labs in quite a while.
While this doesn't necessarily pose a problem in most
setups, Small Form Factor (SFF) owners may have some
difficulty trying to install this card into their cramped
confines.
The main difference between the newer AA5700U and Chaintech's earlier entry, the SA5700U, was the addition
of twin fans that are lit up with blue LEDs. These provide
a steady blue glow, but, unfortunately are pointed
downwards so the full effect may be lost in most scenarios
(obviously, they wouldn't even be seen at all in
non-windowed cases.) Other than the upgraded cooling, the
core and memory speeds of the two cards, and thus the
performance, should remain the same.
e-VGA's e-GeForce 5900XT
The
eVGA e-GeForce 5900XT is a slightly modified version of
the 5900SE that we reviewed a few months back. The most
noticeable difference was the removal of the heatsinks
over the RAM chips, but a keen eye will also catch the
fact that the PCB is more of an aqua than the previous
green. As before, the 5900XT uses a
slim, single-slot heatsink placed over the GPU, with a fan
rated at around 6000rpm. The fan runs very quiet in spite
of its high speed, so you won't have to worry about
any excessive noise. In comparison to the 5700
Ultra models we've seen, the lower clock speed of the
memory and the inclusion of DDR over DDR2 resulted in less
heat being output, which explains the comparatively
smaller amount of cooling needed.
A 4-pin MOLEX connection will be necessary to power the
card, so make sure that your power supply has at least one
available.
e-VGA's
e-GeForce 5950 Ultra
Our last entry also comes
to us by the way of e-VGA, one of NVIDIA's release
partners. Strictly abiding by NVIDIA's
reference design, the e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is one of
the meanest-looking contraptions to ever find its way into
the innards of a PC. The GPU cooler is a shrouded mini version of
what looks like an copper finned CPU cooler, although
the black turbine
fan is larger now, nearly 2.5 inches across in diameter,
versus the 1.5" fan that is on the GFFX5900 reference
design. This larger fan spins much slower, but also pushes more air
volume per RPM, over the heat-sink areas of both the GPU
and memory. The good news is, while this is the
fastest GeForce FX 59xx series product yet, it is also the
quietest high-end board from NVIDIA we've had in the lab. It is nice and quiet, on par with
a Radeon 9800XT, while ramped up to its higher 3D gaming speed
settings, but just a tad louder than the 9800XT when in
2D mode.
ATi's Radeon triumvirate
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