Tonite we are having a look at one of the heavy weight champions amongst video cards. MSI sent us their FX5950 Ultra video card for a little test run. This card seems to be a monster by just having a look at the cooler on the card itself. We will compare it to some other commoon cards that are popular on the market at this moment. We will test this in some games and some overclocking of course so this should be interesting.
About MSI:
Founded in August 1986, MSI has continued to uphold a business philosophy that stresses "Award-winning product quality and outstanding customer service." MSI specializes in the design and manufacture of mainboards and add-on cards. Surmounting a challenging industry environment, we've raced to the head of the pack and are now ranked within Taiwan's Top Three and the world's Top Five mainboard manufactures.
Specifications:
GeforceFX 5950 Ultra Chipset Features
256-Bit Advanced Memory Interface
� Wider memory data path with nextgeneration controller technology for superior throughput
NVIDIA CINEFX 2.0 Engine
� Advanced pixel shaders deliver 2x the floating-point pixel shader performance of previous generations.
� Support for MicrosoftR DirectXR 9.0 (DX9) pixel shader 2.0+
� Support for DX9 vertex shader 2.0+
� Long pixel programs up to 1,024 instructions.
� Long vertex programs up to 256 static instructions with up to 65,536 instructions executed.
� Dynamic, conditional execution and flow control.
� Architected for Cg and Microsoft HLSL for maximum compatibility with nextgeneration content.
� 128-bit, studio-quality, floating-point precision computation through the entire rendering pipeline.
� Native hardware support for 32-bpp, 64-bpp and 128-bpp rendering modes.
� Up to 16 textures per rendering pass.
� Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures.
� DirectX and S3TC texture compression.
� Optimized for 32-bpp, 24-bpp, 16-bpp, 15-bpp, and 8-bpp modes.
� True-color, 64x64 hardware cursor alpha.
� Multibuffering (double, triple, or quad) for smooth animation and video playback.
Intellisample HCT
� Increased visual quality at higher resolutions through advances in compression, anisotropic filtering, and antialiasing technology.
� Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance.
� Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for both color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates.
� Fast z-clear
Ultrashdow Technology
� Accelerates shadow volumes for nextgeneration games.
� Accurately maintains shadows while discarding non-useful information
Advanced Display Pipeline With Full NVIDIA NVIEW Capabilities
� Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder supporting resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need for panning with built-in Macrovision
copy protection. � DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
� Dual, integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536@85Hz
� Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters.
� Internal TV support.
� VIP 1.1 interface support for video-in function.
� Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support for multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window.
Digital Vibrance control (DVC) 3.0
� DVC image sharpening controls
� DVC color controls
Advanced Technology
� AGP 8X including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
� 0.13-micron process technology for higher levels of integration and higher operating clock speeds
� Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring
� 40 mmx40 mm, BGA 1309 flip-chip package
256-bit
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 30.4GB/sec
Fill Rate: 3.8 billion texels/sec.
Vertices/sec. 356 million
Memory Data Rate: 950MHz
Pixels per Clock (peak): 8
Textures per Pixel: 16*
RAMDACs 400MHz
More specifications can be found at their website
The product:
Please click on thumbnails to get bigger pictures
The package for a start is amazing. It has a nice logo and it opens up. On the back you have specifications and features on this card. It's probably the biggest video card box I have ever seen in my life :) Hopefully the card will be as amazing as the box :)
Please click on thumbnails to get bigger pictures
I said before that the box opens up in the front and you get even more information. On the right picture we can see the inside, and here we see that everything has it own little compartment. Very nicely done and this probably helps the beginners to figure out what every part actually is.
