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NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Preview

by David Ross on 27 January 2003, 00:00

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Introduction



Within recent months we have seen a lot of dominance in the high end sector from ATI. They have come out with a storming card which has taken over the lead in the high end market in the past few months. But they didn't think that they could retain it for long did they? Well today we will be testing the latest GPU from nVIDIA - the FX!

The nVIDIA Geforce 4 TI clan have been with us for the last year - they have been implemented in different ways and show different performance levels but somewhat confusing when it comes down to which one is for you, since companies like Gainward and Albatron coupled the low end GPU with 8 layer PCB, BGA ram, and other performance you would expect to see on a higher rated card.

The NVIDIA FX GPU has been so well hyped ever since the technology launch back in December. The cards are something new, something different. These cards are the first NVIDIA GPU which is using .13 Micron technology, the first to use DDR2 etc. So is it worth it? Well read on!



So, we turn up on Sunday at NVIDIA UK's offices to get on with some testing - there was no chance we could do it any other way. We thought finally we would see final silicon in action and we would stop getting loads of emails from all you readers asking when we would see some cards. This card is hard core, pure and simple. The card(s)! Which we got to test were the NVIDIA Geforce FX 5800 Ultra, this was a reference board but this doesn't mean anything - it could have been from any of the European launch partners - Creative, Terratec, or PNY. We didn't get long enough to do everything to the card we wanted so please bear with us - we ran around 150 benchmarks. The Specs are : 128MB DDR2, and a 500MHz Clock speed. This card is a tasty little number but at nearly Ā£400 for the ULTRA edition will it be worth it?

On paper the card is impressive, what did we think to it? How did we think it would stand up against ATIs flag ship GPU? Well there was only one way to test! bring on the benchmarks!