Card appearance
Gainward has upped this card's specifications to 500MHz core and 1000MHz memory. We're not too surprised to see a core jump, but we're pleased to see bandwidth being pushed out to a theoretical 16GB/s. Lots of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering will make full use of it.
Whereas ATI is now keen to use PCB space to the absolute fullest (compare the 9800XT to the 9800 Pro, for example), Gainward and NVIDIA continue their 'make it as long as you can' theme. The amount of unused PCB space is surprising, and as you can see, the AGP connectors barely make it to the centre of the card. That said, it's superbly constructed. Most notable standout for us is the dual DVI connectors on the left-hand side. The back of the card can be seen here. The funky pink RAMsinks hide some DDR2 memory that's coerced to run at 1000MHz, which is almost 100MHz above stock FX 5700 Ultra specifications.
Gainward has kept faith in the same design of cooler for some time, and it works just fine. The ribbing allows for increased surface area, and the fan doesn't assault the ears, unlike some of NVIDIA's past efforts. Anyone care to remember the contraption affectionately known as The Dustbuster ?.
It's difficult to find out the wattage requirements of 9600XT and FX 5700 Ultra cards. NVIDIA still persists with a molex-driven approach. We've seen many 9600XTs run without the need for auxillary power.
Right underneath the cooler are two of the more useful ASICs. Philips' SAA7108AE VIVO chip allows for decoding / encoding resolutions of up to 1280x1024, making it amongst the best of the bunch. Most ATI cards, besides the All-In-Wonder series, offer plain TV-Out only. It's these little factors that add value to a package. Silicon Image's Sil164CT64 chip powers one DVI port at up to UXGA (1600x1200) resolutions. The other, presumably, is run off the card's integrated TMDS (something that was conspicuously missing from the GeForce 4 GPU, incidentally). We'd ideally have preferred two Silicon Image transmitters, as NVIDIA's internal TMDS has been found wanting in the past, especially when asked to drive an UXGA display (162MHz bandwidth)
There we have it. Two DVI connectors sandwiching a VIVO-equipped S-Video socket. For users with regular HD15 connections, Gainward also bundles in two DVI-to-VGA dongles. Decent design, decent implementation, all in a good-looking package. Our main desire would be for a smaller card. We're adamant that all components could be situated on a Radeon 9800-sized PCB.
On to the bundle.
