X-bit labs

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 XT – a Competitor for ATI RADEON 9600 SE?

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/13/2003 | 02:35 PM ]

NVIDIA Corporation reportedly went ATI Technologies’ way of making relatively expensive graphics cards cheaper to address certain lower-end markets. According to Chinese GZeasy.com web-site, GeForce FX 5600 XT-based graphics cards had emerged in China. The 5600 XT GPU is a cut-down version of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 design offering less performance, but at some user-friendly price-point.

Unlike the name suggests, the 5600 XT will not bring eXTended performance, like RADEON 9600 XT does over RADEON 9600 PRO; in contrast, the GeForce FX 5600 XT will work even slower compared to the GeForce FX 5600. NVIDIA recommends clocking the 5600 XT solutions at 235/400MHz core/memory instead of 325/550 for the ordinary GeForce FX 5600 products.

The demonstrated GeForce FX 5600 XT GPU was manufactured on the 31^st week of August, as I managed to learn from pictures published over here. This makes me think that NVIDIA has intentionally collected the graphics processors that were unable to achieve higher core-clocks to sell them at lower price-point. The 5600 XT solution with 128MB of memory and typical set of outputs, including D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out, is probably designed in order to compete with ATI RADEON 9600 SE, even though also this allows NVIDIA to get rid of low-speed GeForce FX 5600 GPUs. 

There is no information about memory bus width of the GeForce FX 5600 XT. I believe it will be 128-bit initially, but we may see graphics cards with 64-bit bus in future. It is pretty hard to estimate performance of the product, but I believe it is a bit faster than the typical GeForce FX 5200, but slower than the premier GeForce FX 5200 Ultra.

NVIDIA Corporation from Santa Clara, California, has not officially announced GeForce FX 5600 XT products so far. The appearance of such devices in China may mean that this is a niche product.