The Card Itself
As you can see, the box is little different from the box you get with the regular V9950. Ultra and 256MB are the terms to look out for and they are in plain sight. At least you know what's going to be in the box.
Opening the box up, we've got the exact same box contents as the regular V9950. That's to say, the same manual, same game bundle and the same sparse extras (DVI-to-VGA adaptor and S-Video cable), all wrapped up in a bland and unexciting white box. It's no MSI presentation that's for sure. If I was to buy one off the shelf, I'd initially wonder where the wrong side of £325 had just gone.
However, unearthing the card from its humble surroundings and you are soon aware, as the shot above of the card in the test rig shows. The monstrous blue PCB, more copper than a plumbers van and the gold coloured backplate, all conspire to give the impression of luxury. It's rare to think that about a piece of tarted up silicon, but I definitely thought something.
It's an NVIDIA GeForce FX5900 Ultra, which means that power supply help is needed from an external source. Try as it might, the AGP slot is nowhere near meaty enough to meet the demands of an FX5900, so your power supply has to step in. That it does, with the supplied splitter cable.
Finally, another shot of the card sat on my desk, how exciting.
It's a single slot card for a change too. Able to fit into the most cramped cases, you'll even fit something in the adjacent PCI slot if you don't mind blocking all the airflow. Not recommended however, but doable.
