Related Articles

The Card

The Golden Sample FX 5950 Ultra deviates substantially from the reference nVidia design. Unlike its competitors and predecessors, the Golden Sample is a true single slot design, unlike the reference two-slot design or MSI's pseudo single-slot design (which only took one bracket, but interfered with installing a PCI card in the first slot. If you look at the image below, you see that the 4-pin molex connector attaches from the side, which means that you no longer have to flip the connector 180 degrees from the power supply. Interestingly, the card runs with or without the connector. Unlike the Radeon 9700 Pro, which corrupts a lot of things if you don't plug in the connector, the FX 5950 continues to run, albeit at a much lower speed (we found this out intentionally - in no way did we forget to plug in the connector... really). Halo timedemo runs at maybe 10 frames/second with the connector out, so it's not something we would suggest you do. Nobody needs a $400 GeForce 4 MX.

Assuming you did plug in the molex connector, and that the card is running at full speed, the card will run at 500 mhz for the core, and 1000 mhz for the (256 megs worth of) memory. This is default only when you install Gainward's drivers. Otherwise, it will be detected at the default GeForce FX 5950 Ultra specifications of 475/950. The card also has the now-standard VGA/DVI-I/VIVO connectors.

In order to compensate for the lost heatsink size which was required by the reference design, Gainward installed an aluminum heatsink which covered both sides (GPU and Ram chips).

To compensate for the extra cooling provided by the larger fan, Gainward installed 2 fans onto the heatsink. The cooling improves, but the noise level also increases significantly.

Also of note is that the fans have 3 red LEDs in each one. On the box, it says that the LEDs light up in a "cool blue", but we think that red was a much better choice to go along with the flame motif on the heatsink.

Here's a picture of it while running:

Although the LEDs show up slightly orange in the photo, the LEDs are in fact just a very bright red. Perhaps it was just too bright for the camera to capture properly.