Noise, Overclockability, 2D Quality

Noise is no problem with this card – the device is quiet, although audible in an open system case. Moreover, the top fan in our particular sample would sometimes emit a soft rustling sound –because the bearing was bad or maybe because the card was new. This may be a feature of our particular card only, though.

Overclocking was not simple. It turned out that the card could work in two frequency modes: standard (400/700MHz) and enhanced (450/780MHz). These modes, however, are not changed by the hardware – you enable the enhanced mode in the Gainward EXPERTool utility you find on the driver CD. It only installs itself into the Windows system folder and you cannot change this. After the installation, you get a cute icon in the tray, lose 5MB of system RAM, and access a menu with numerous links of questionable value, as the standard ForceWare driver already offers all these options. There is however one place in this program you may want to visit – the Performance tab.

After you click the Enhanced Mode Settings button, the frequency indicators show 450/780MHz – you can click Apply to apply the changes and make the card use these clock rates. The utility is started up automatically at the OS boot (you have an option of disabling its autorun), but its usefulness seems dubious: it takes 5MB of memory, but doesn’t perform any unique functions that you wouldn’t be able to use without it. As an overclocking utility, EXPERTool is of little interest: it offers a too-narrow frequency range with a ceiling of 480MHz GPU and 850MHz memory. Overclockers had better use advanced utilities like RivaTuner or PowerStrip. We did so and made the card work at 480/950MHz – an excellent result for a GeForce FX 5900 XT! In fact, the card surpassed the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra in the core frequency, although not much. Considering the absolute identity of the NV35 and NV38 architectures, we can expect the Gainward card to show a similar performance. Frankly speaking, we reached even higher, to 500MHz, but saw some artifacts in the image. The artifacts were fewer at 490MHz, but still persisted, so we stopped at 480MHz as the maximum stable GPU clock rate.

I should warn overclockers who are foretasting an easy speedup: the thermal conditions were very harsh for the card at such overclocking and the heatsink on the backside of the PCB was very hot. It would be a good idea to mount an additional blower on the entire card.

2D quality was good, too, in all resolutions including 1600x1200@85Hz. Well, there’s now little sense in mentioning 2D quality in reviews as all well-known companies operating in Europe and the USA take care that their products produced a good 2D image. Moreover, the growing popularity of TFT monitors makes this problem less urgent.