PNY GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

Company: PNY
Product: GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Street Price: ~$499
Date Reviewed: July 22, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

The Card Layout:

This video card is a monster. The cooling design is very different from what we have normally seen. On the front you can see a massive cooler that covers about half of the card as well as the memory chips. The fan on the cooler is somewhat loud and for some, it may be an issue for purchasing this card. The back of the card is really no different from the front. There is a very large back plate that covers about half of the card. In respects to length, this card is about as long across as our ABIT IS7 motherboard.

All of the GeForce FX line offer features such as DirectX 9 support, CineFX 2.0 engine, and Intellisample HCT. The card comes in clocked at 450/850. These clocks are a little bit higher than the Radeon 9800 Pro making the FX a good candidate for NVIDIA to reclaim to speed crown back from ATi. In the picture above you can see the actual 5900 GPU. Underneath the heat spreader is the actual core. We have already pulled this heat spreader off just to get an idea of how good the contact between it and the core is. To put it short, it's not good. As usual with NVIDIA heat spreaders, this one is not completely flat and doesn't even really make contact with the chip.

From this picture, you can see that this card will take up two PCI slots. There are probably a few users who do use all of their PCI slots, so this could be a big problem. We haven't had a chance to review any other 5900 Ultra's, so it is hard for us to say whether or not all of them will take up to slots. The card uses two slots because of the massive heatsink design.

The I/O configuration has connectors for the monitor, DVI, and S-Video. This is pretty basic, but you normally don't find any other connectors on video card. These are pretty much the standard ones you see on today's high end units.

The memory chips on this card are labeled as HY5DU28322. The chips are manufactured by Hynix and are rated a 2.2ns meaning that they run at 450MHz. These should be relatively good overclockers but we will look into that more in the overclocking section of the review. A large heat spreader covers all of the memory chips. You might not be able to really tell in the picture but a thermal pad is in-between the heat spreaders and the chips. Enthusiasts may want to remove the thermal pads and use their own compound such as Arctic Silver or Shin Etsu.