1. Introduction | 2. Driver Discussion | 3. Benchmarking (3dmark/CC) | 4. Benchmarking (UT2003) | 5. Benchmarking OpenGL | 6. Overclocking & Conclusion    


PNY GEFORCE FX 5600



Reviewed by Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson
Design by Allan "Zardon" Campbell

INTRODUCTION:
Back in January 2002 the majority of graphics cards came with 64mb of memory, with the high end of the market being the realm of the 128mb versions. Over the last few months we have seen the first 256mb cards make an appearance in the high end of the market with ATI’s 9800pro and NVIDIA’s 5900. Today we are taking a look at PNY’s Geforce FX 5600. The PNY card ships at approximately £145 and comes with 256mb of RAM making it one of the first cards to bring 256mb to the mainstream market.

PRODUCT OVERVIEW:

What’s In the Box?


The card comes with a detailed manual, s-video cable, dvi-vga dongle, TV-out cable, Elder Scrolls 3 –Morrowind and Tribunal and a Driver CD. A decent bundle given the price. The only thing I feel the package lacks is some DVD playback software such as Power DVD or NV-DVD.



The card itself is smaller than the 5800/5900, has a much quieter cooling system and it comes clocked at 325mhz for the core and 400mhz for the ram.

It is certainly eye-catching with the purple PCB and silver cooler/ramsinks – had PNY fitted a L.E.D. in the centre of the fan, which would light up the see-through fan fins, we would have one excellent looking card. A feature of the layout that surprised me when I first viewed the card was that the ram chips are located only on the front of PCB.




Before listing the detailed specs of the card there is one feature of this package worthy of a mention. PNY offer a 5 year replacement warranty on this card which is in my opinion truly exceptional.

Here are the detailed specifications from PNY’s website:

KEY FEATURES & BENEFITS

  • NVIDIA CineFX engine
    Delivers film-quality effects and studio-quality color for every application.
  • 128-bit Studio-Precision Color
    The industries best image quality for the most demanding applications.
  • NVIDIA Intellisample technology
    The industries fasted and highest quality antialiasing delivers ultra-realistic visuals at lightning fast speeds.
  • AGP8X
    Provides double the bandwidth of AGP 4X allowing for uninterrupted data flow resulting in smoother video streaming and seamless gameplay.
  • Architectured for Cg
    Ensures that the newest, cutting edge special effects in applications will run flawlessly.
  • Digital Vibrance Control 3.0
    Allows the user to adjust color controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions of their workspace, in order to achieve accurate, bright colors in all conditions.
  • NVIDIA nView multi-display Technology
    Connect and control multiple displays for the ultimate in viewing flexibility.
  • Integrated TV encoder
    Provides best-of-class TV-out functionality up to 1024x768 resolutions.
  • Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
    Delivers full frame rate, full screen MPEG-2 video on your desktop.
  • Microsoft® DirectX 9.0 Optimizations and Support
    Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications.
  • Open GL 1.4 Optimizations and Support
    Ensures the best application compatibility performance for all OpenGL applications.
  • Unified Driver Support
    Guarantees forward and backward compatibility.

PERFORMANCE FEATURES

  • 256-bit graphics core
  • 128-bit DDR memory interface
  • 8.8GB/sec. memory bandwidth
  • 1.3 billion texels/sec. fill rate
  • 81 million vertices/sec setup
  • 4 pixels per clock (peak)
  • 16 textures per pixel (max in a single rendering pass)
  • DX9 with Vertex Shader 2.0+ and Pixel Shader 2.0+
  • Dual 400MHz RAMDAC’s
  • Max display resolution 2048 x 1536 x 32 bpp at 85Hz
  • Flat Panel display support with resolutions up to 1600 x 1200

GeForce FX 5600 AGP FEATURES
High-Performance, High Precision 3D Rendering Engine

  • 4 pixels per clock rendering engine
  • 128-bit, studio quality floating point precision through the entire graphics pipeline
  • Support for 128-bit floating point, 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering modes
  • Up to 16 textures per pass
  • Support for sRBG texture format for gamma textures
  • DirectX and S3TC texture compression
High-Performance 2D Rendering Engine
  • Optimized for 32, 24, 16, 15, and 8-bpp modes
  • True-color 64x64 hardware cursor with alpha
  • Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for smooth animation and video playback
Antialiasing
  • Blistering fast antialiasing performance
  • Adaptive tecture filtering
  • Fast Z-clear
Advanced Display Pipeline with full nView Capabilities
  • Dual 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to 2048x1536 @ 75Hze
  • Integrated TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024x768
  • DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
  • Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full quality and features in each window

Warranty and Service

  • PNY Technologies offers a 5 years replacement warranty


Next: Driver Discussion

1. Introduction | 2. Driver Discussion | 3. Benchmarking (3dmark/CC) | 4. Benchmarking (UT2003) | 5. Benchmarking OpenGL | 6. Overclocking & Conclusion