NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra: Made in Korea?

by Anton Shilov
07/04/2003 | 10:46 AM

We managed to get a Siluro FX 5600 Ultra DT graphics card from ABIT based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra graphics processor at 350MHz. The graphics card is quite an interesting solution and we are working to on its review that will be up soon. Probably the most surprising part of the graphics card is its GPU that is apparently made in Korea, not in Taiwan, as all other GeForce FX graphics processors.

Take a look at the picture. Unfortunately, its quality is not the best, but you can still see the words “Korea” and “5600 Ultra” as well as the NVIDIA GeForce FX logotype.

All the engineering samples of the code-named NV31 graphics processors from NVIDIA were made and packaged in Taiwan. As everybody knows, TSMC has no facilities in Korea, hence, the chips were either made or packed by a third-party not known in connection to NVIDIA’s products. Since all the early samples of the GeForce FX 5600 GPUs were manufactured at TSMC, I can hardly believe that the company has managed to redesign the die for a completely different facility in Korea. If they actually did, this would be amazing.

Summing the facts up, I can assume that NVIDIA out-sources packaging of at least some of its graphics processors to a Korean firm. Since I have not heard about GeForce FX 5800, 5900 or 5200 with “Korea” mark, I believe that only GeForce FX 5600-series are packed on a Korean facility due to an unknown reason, probably in an attempt to increase yields or reduce certain costs.

The graphics processor from the picture was made on the 13^th week of 2003, in late March.

The Siluro FX 5600 Ultra DT graphics card from ABIT is made according to the reference design with only some minor exceptions. It features D-Sub, DVI-I, TV-Out connectors, 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory functioning at 700MHz and a really funky cooling system. Besides, ABIT included some interesting software and a lot of useful cables in its product bundle.