NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra card we tested came from Chaintech:

The graphics card uses scrupulously the reference design from NVIDIA. The cool-looking copper cooler on the face side of the card takes heat off the graphics processors and memory chips. A passive heatsink covers the chips on the backside of the card.

The card carries 128MB of DDR2 memory from Samsung with a cycle time of 2.2ns (Samsung K4N26323AE-GC22). The nominal clock rates 475/900 (450DDR) MHz.

This graphics card was good at overclocking, notching 610/1000MHz – the GPU frequency was slightly higher than with the previous card, while the memory showed a smaller result.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700

The GeForce FX 5700 differs from the Ultra version in the frequencies of the GPU and memory. There are no differences in functionality or the memory bus width between Ultra and non-Ultra variants of the GeForce 5700. This doesn’t refer to the PCB design, though. The graphics card from Albatron is an example of this different wiring:

An extraordinary thing about the Albatron card is the weirdly-shaped cooler. I wonder whose imagination concocted this construction that looks like a turned-over skull with fans in the eyes. I have no doubt that they could achieve better cooling using these two fans, but in a traditional cooler. For example, they could have removed the combs that block airflow above and below the cooler. Well, some people may find this shape interesting, who knows?

The Albatron card carries 128MB of DDR SDRAM in Samsung chips with a cycle time of 4ns (Samsung K4D261638E-TC40).

The nominal clock rates are 425/500 (250 DDR) MHz. That is, the GPU frequency is 10% lower than in the Ultra version, while the memory frequency dropped by one third and more.

The card has average overclockability: 470/660MHz.