VGA Roundup

Review Pages

1. Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Ultimate
2. Exair Radeon 9800 XT
3. Asus V9950 FX 5900 GE
4. Exair GeForce FX 5900 XT
5. Test specifications
6. 3DMark Benchmark tests
7. Aquamark3 Benchmark tests
8. Codecreatures Benchmark tests
9. GL Excess Benchmark tests
10. Farcry & Painkiller tests
11. Unreal Tournament 2004 & 2003 tests
12. Halo & Tomb Raider:AOD tests
13. Overclocking
14. Conclusion

EXAIR GEFORCE FX 5900 XT 128MB

Established in 1998, Exair Computer began as a hardware manufacturer that marketed Graphic cards, TFT LCD monitors, TV Tuner cards, and Modem for the European market. Exair's VGA card solutions are based on both ATI's and Nvidia's GPUs. If you take a look on Exair's site you will see a great variety of VGA cards such as the Radeon 9800 XT and the Nvidia FX 5950 Ultra high-tech series.

In this comparison review we also include Exair's Geforce 5900 XT with 128MB DDR. Below you can see the preferences, screenshots and general hardware issues about the card. The benchmarks and game test comparisons are included in the following pages.

- Specifications

GPU	GEFORCE FX 5900 XT (NV 35)
Memory Bus Width	128MB DDR MEMORY
Memory interface	256 Bit DDR
Memory Type	BGA DDR2
Core Clock	400 MHz
Memory Clock	700 Mhz (2x350)
Memory Bandwidth	22.4 GB/sec
Pixel FillRate	3.2 Gpixels/sec
Geometry rate	300 Mtriangles/sec
Bus	8x/4x/2x AGP
Processing technology	0.15µ
Output Connections	VGA + TV + DVI
Cooling	single-slot Fansink
2D Display Resolutions & Hz	640x480@240, 800x600@240, 1024x768@200, 1152x864@170, 1280x1024@150, 1600x1200@100, 1920x1440@85, 2048x1536@85
3D Maximum resolution	2048x1536 with 16.7M colors
Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF)	2x/4x/8x/16x
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) modes	2x/4x/6x/8x
Dual Display	Supported
Pipelines	4
Texture units per pixel pipeline	2
Technologies supported	- Intellisample HCT is a new compression scheme for better compression at high resolutions with Anti-Aliasing. - UltraShadow Technology enables a Higher Quality and cinematic experience in games - CineFX 2.0 doubles the performance of floating-point pixel shader operations. - LMA II contains a lossless form of Z-compression, saving memory bandwidth for higher performance.
Pixel Shader Support	2.0+
Vertex Shader Support	2.0+
DTV/HDTV decoding	Supported
System requirements	The minimum system requirements for the card and complementary software: - PC with Pentium 4 / III 450 MHz or AMD Athlon processor with AGP 4x/8x universal slot -128MB of system memory and 1.6 GB of hard disk space -8x speed CD-ROM drive, DVD playback requires DVD drive -300-Watt power supply or greater - Windows 2000, 98SE, ME, XP and DirectX 9.0 - Microsoft DirectX 3.0 compatible sound card - Monitor supported: CRT-15 pin, Svideo, Composite and DVI-I (LCD)

Judging by the Specifications of the GeForce FX 5900 XT, we conclude that this model is slightly lighter that its predecessor. When ATI launched its XT series, they were definitely more powerful than its Pro series. It seems that the "XT" expression has different meaning for ATI and Nvidia. So be careful and never judge a VGA card by its name!

- 3D Mark detailed specifications

- The chipset

The front side. Nothing revolutionary.

As for the technical aspect, there's nothing spectacular about the card architecture. The plain single-slot Fansink doesn't look very promising and there surely are better cooling solutions than this. Exair has launched some other awesome Nvidia based cards with a lot better and more impressive cooling solutions. You can view them here. Perhaps in the future we'll have the opportunity to review some of them.