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Overclocking:

We managed to take the Gigabyte up to 524/992, coincedentally exactly the same as the nVidia reference card. Anything higher would result in glitches in 3DMark03. We allowed the card to run at this speed for about 30 minutes or until visual artifacts came up.

Conclusion:

After this long good look at graphs of the Radeon 9600XT, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and GeForce FX 5900, it's time to draw some conclusions.

Out of the 8 benchmarks the Gigabyte FX 5700 Ultra beats the 9600XT in 7 of them all. From our benchmark results we can conclude that the FX 5700 performs better than the 9600XT. And even better when AA/AF is activated, apart from Tomb Raider: AOD. We also noticed something interesting from graphs and that is that the FX 5700 Ultra does not perform proportionally with the resolution. As you can see in most of our graphs, the gradient of the FX 5700 Ultra seems to decrease once we switch to 1600x1200. Aside from performance, the FX 5700 package is superb. With three great 3D games included it suddenly makes this card much worth buying. Only disappointment is the missing S-video cable.

However with the price drop of the FX 5900, the FX 5700 will have a hard time on the market. Obviously there is no doubt that the FX 5900 performs the best out of the cards in this review. On Newegg, 3 Gigabyte branded retail cards are priced at 151$, 180$ and 205$ for the 9600XT, 5700 Ultra and the 5900XT respectively. The pricing structure sort of makes sense for Gigabyte. The 5700 performs admirably well compared to the 9600XT. The problem is that it does not perform 20% of the price better. The performance difference between the 5700 and 5900 series is a lot larger by far. The Gigabyte 9600XT also has the advantage of being the lowest priced 9600XT on Newegg while the Gigabyte branded 5700 Ultra and 5900XT are closer to the top of the pack in terms of price. A 5900 from another company is listed there is only a mere 10$ more than the Gigabyte 5700 Ultra and it also includes Call of Duty, an arguably stronger title than the Gigabyte bundle because of its recent retail release.

The 5700 compares favorably to the 9600 XT and that was reflected in our previous analysis of the card, but the introduction of the 5900 variants in the same price range puts the 5700 is a very difficult position. No doubt that it is not cheap to produce with the 900 Mhz memory and the high clocked core but Nvidia needs to figure out their pricing strategy- it makes no sense to have 2 cards at the same general price range that perform vastly different. On the ATI side there is a definite price gap between the 9600 XT and the 9700 Pro / 9800 Non Pro. Unfortunately Gigabyte does not do enough to differentiate their 5700 from other similar products on the market. At this point in time, it is a bit difficult to recommend the 5700 seeing as how there are better solutions available. If the price were to drop considerably (say, 30, 40$), the 5700 would be a very compelling solution but that could take sometime and may not be feasible at all. If a user must have a Nvidia card, the 5900 series is the way to go. The 5700 Ultra is definitely not a bad card but as is just a little lacking in value compared to other solutions available.

Overall Score 8/10