Concluding thoughts
The FX 5700 graphics cards, based on the NV36 chipset, are a decent bunch. Plenty of midrange power is helped by excellent RAM speeds on the Ultra models. Decent enough fillrate power and reasonable DX9 implementation allow them to stake a claim for systems priced at around the £700 - £800 mark. Gainward has chosen the FX 5700 Ultra as a base for 3 graphics cards. All carry dual-DVI capability.The Gainward GeForce FX 5700 Ultra Golden Sample Ultra/960 Dual-DVI 128MB card has a misleading title, as do most Gainwards. The basic speeds have been bumped up from the regular 475MHz core and 906MHz memory to a tasty 500MHz / 1000MHz combination. That makes it faster than your average garden-variety of FX 5700 Ultra, obviously. We like the board construction, elegant RAMsinks and VIVO capability. It can be considered an all-rounder. Dual DVI is a nice and increasingly useful touch. Running 2 DVI-capable TFT monitors isn't as exotic as it once was, and picture quality benefits from not having to run the conversion chain of digital-analogue-digital. In a nutshell, the hardware is above average for a card currently retailing at less than £150.
Our very first, very real concern for the Gainward's selling potential is extraneous to the card, and the scary competition isn't from ATI. Rather. NVIDIA has seen fit to introduce an FX 5900 derivative into the midrange crowd. The all-new FX 5900XT is priced at the Gainward's levels. It however, sports a 256-bit wide memory bus that pushes out more than 20GB/s of juicy memory bandwidth. The core's none too shabby, either. Put it this way, why would you buy a product that you know to be inferior in pure performance terms ?. We can't think of many reasons.
Our second area of concern falls to the seemingly generic Gainward software bundles. Isn't it about time a couple of top gaming titles were included to keep the user happy. 1GHz memory speed and not a game to play with it. That doesn't make the Dual-DVI card bad. It's not, and it's a good example of FX 5700 Ultra technology. We're left with the nagging feeling that NVIDIA has orchestrated the premature death for the FX 5700 Ultra with its own 5900XT. Thus we think Gainward's diligent NV36 efforts may prove futile.
Bottom line - A good showcase for the FX 5700 Ultra. But that may not be enough when the impact of the 5900XT is fully realised.
