If you’ve been watching the news in the last few weeks, you’ll know that all is not well in the nV camp. There are some serious questions about the NV3x architecture’s ability to handle DirectX 9. In the following review, I’ve got an exclusive look at the FX 5900 Turbo from Albatron, which I’ve tested with the latest Detonator 51.75 beta drivers, and some real world DirectX 9 titles. Read on...
Most video card releases from nVidia are either mid-cycle refreshers (read: clock speed bumps), or completely new architecture. The NV35 that is the FX 5900 is actually a bit of both. Both the NV30 (FX 5800) and NV35 are designed on a 256-bit architecture, and both run off a 4 x 2 rendering pipeline design. The main difference between the older NV30 and the newer NV35 is that the NV35 adds a 256-bit memory architecture to the mix, which doubles the memory bandwidth per clock.
Due to the more efficient 256-bit architecture, even at a reduced 850 MHz clock speed, the 5900 Ultra can push over 27 GB/s of memory bandwidth, quite a bit more over ATi's Radeon 9800 Pro, which at default clock speed is about 21 GB/s. The 5900 utilizes 2.2ns BGA DDR-I memory, which fortunately runs much cooler than the 1000mhz DDR-II in the NV30 (I’m sure we all remember FXFlow), and so the infamous hairdryer is not required.
In their typical fashion, Albatron was not content to simply make a FX5900 and FX5900 Ultra like most other board makers. There are actually 5 Albatron models in total, with the FX 5900 Turbo being closest in spec to the 5900 Ultra. Basically, it boasts an incredible 10mhz core speed boost over the regular FX5900, and like the Ultra, has 256mb of onboard ram. All FX5900s (including the Ultra) use the same 2.2ns 850mhz DDR.
