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Chaintech GeForce FX5900XT Video Card Review

Company:

Chaintech Inc., www.chaintech.com.tw

Price:

Suggested retail price is $180 US.

Ratings

Price:
Install/Setup:
Usability:
Support:
Average Rating:

Pros:

• Great value with exceptional performance.
• Included software and game demos really help give the card a once over.

Cons:

• Doesn't come with an overclocking utility like the Prolink card did, but there are plenty around to make overclocking the card a breeze.

The Card

After coming at you with a solid nVidia FX5900XT review, we are back again with another great video card. The Chaintech GeForce FX5900XT video card we are testing this week retails for about $180 US. It is also backed with 128MB of DDR RAM, a DVI port, as well as an S-Video output. Once again with an nVidia FX5900XT chip under the hood, the results are pretty good. Chaintech includes a bundle of cables along with the card. Also included is WinDVD 4, WinDVD Creator, WinRip, MDK2, a Game pack (5 games on 1 disk--Age of Wonders 2, Serious Sam 2, Rally Trophy, Max Panye, and Tropico) and 3Deep (a monitor color management tool).

Chaintech has put together a decent blue card. In fact, this is one of few FX5900XT cards to feature heatsinks covering the RAM. The GPU cooler is also slightly different to many of the other FX5900XT brands. The paddle wheel style fan should push a good amount of air across the heatsink keeping this card running quite cool.

Detailed Specifications

Over Clocking

Out of the box, the Chaintech FX5900XT core is clocked at 390 MHz. Starting at 390 MHz, we increased the core speed to 415 MHz. The FX5900XT had no problem with that. We were able to push it to 438 MHz before we started having stability issues.

Next up was the memory. The memory was already clocked at its theoretical max speed (1000 MHz / 2.8ns x 2 = 714 MHz). As with the Prolink FX5900XT, we were pretty sure the memory on the Chaintech would be good to somewhere between 760-780 MHz. Starting at 700 MHz we slowly raised the memory frequency in 5 MHz intervals. We were able to hit 760 MHz before it became unstable. At these setting the overclocked core and memory played very well together and even gave us a little more performance as noted below in the benchmark results.

Benchmark Test Results

Once again, just for comparison, we include a few benchmark results. The Chaintech GeForce FX5900XT video card was addd to our test system which is made up of the following:

• Intel P4 2.53GHz Processor
• Gigabyte 8SQ800, SiS 655
• 2x 512MB PC2700 Crucial DDR Memory
• 120 GB WD Speical Edition Hard Drive
• 350W Antec Power Supply
• Windows® XP SP1
• ForceWare Driver version 56.72

Adding It All Up

The Chaintech GeForce FX5900XT is a top notched product. The core over clocked higher than the Prolink FX5900XT, but the memory over clocked a litte less. But the final results are similar. This is a great card at a great price. For only $180 why pass it up? The Chaintech GeForce FX5900XT will not break the bank and you still get a great performing product!

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