Nvidia FX5950 Ultra Review - PAGE 1

The 3d card market has been rocked by a lot of surprises and controversy this year - it's become a sort of soap opera of the technology masses. What's become apparent from our reporting standpoint is that Nvidia is beginning to suffer from its position as the top video card supplier in the world, while ATI is winning a lot of hardcore and early adopter confidence with its products: it's the same Jason versus Goliath story being told on the Intel/AMD front. Is Nvidia really beginning to lose its glitter? Is it becoming the behemoth that no longer respects the hardcore users that it had won over during its early battles with 3dfx? Nvidia doesn't think so, but the enthusiast crowd has definitely been wooed over by ATI's price to performance ratio, and many of them are now wary after all the negative press that Nvidia has been receiving.

It's ironic because on one hand the public ridicules Nvidia for their video card practices, and on the other hand there's no end of praise from the same hardcore public for the Nforce2 chipset that pretty much dominates the AMD enthusiast market. And of course Nvidia's reputation amongst the regular crowd has remained relatively untarnished - the hardcore enthusiast crowd need not represent the opinion of the general masses. Still, Nvidia is definitely not just sitting on their laurels. As long as they don't doesn't find itself in any more scandals, we think the release of the FX5950 Ultra and the FX5700 Ultra will give them a nice picker upper this holiday season and early in 2004: these two cards are evidence that Nvidia is fighting as hard as ever to deliver the products that hardcore users are asking for.

We have both the FX5950 ultra and FX5700 Ultra boards at our test labs, but we received our FX5700 only last Friday and have been pressed to test it fully. For that reason today's article will focus mostly on the FX5950. Our initial tests of the FX5700 Ulra, however, are very encouraging... we think the 5700 will give ATI's 9600XT a real run for its money! With 3 times the processing power of the FX5600 Ultra it's no wonder… I'll show you some initial results later that are quite astonishing.

First let's take a look at the FX5950 in all its glory...

Top view of the FX5950

Memory heat spreader on back of the FX5950

As you can see from those pictures, Nvidia's FX5950 is yet another dual slot design - not surprising since many of you have already seen leaked pictures of the card in our news. The picture of the heatspreader on the back is actually a picture supplied by Nvidia - our own reference sample does NOT use the same fancy aluminum spreader, and instead uses a much less refined looking black cooler, like the one found in our FX5900 Review.