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Gainward PowerPack! Ultra1800PCX GS


Date
: 09/30/04 – 07:32:17 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer:
Gainward

Price:
$250 MSRP

Our last look at a video card was our first look into PCI Express with Albatron's PCX5750 Trinity. This card had a lot of overclocking potential and proved as an ample performer for the price. Therefore, we concluded that the PCX5750 was a great choice for those entering the new Intel LGA 775 platform that were on a budget or saving their dollars for the next generation of video cards. Today we have one of Gainward's PCI Express video card in for testing that offers buyers more performance at a higher price.

Gainward is a nVidia tier-1 partner who only manufacters products built with nVidia GPUs. Gainward currently has three product series that they distinguised by use of cooling technologies. They are:

PowerPack! Series: Uses fan or heatsink for cooling.
CoolFX PowerPack! Series: Uses advanced water cooling system.
SilentFX PowerPack! Series: Uses heatpipe for cooling to eliminate fan noise.

The
Gainward FX PowerPack! Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample"
is the focus of this review. Based on the GeForce FX 5900 XT GPU and a 256-bit memory bus, the Ultra1800PCX should perform well in today's games. Let's start.

Page 2 : Package

The Ultra1800PCX arrived from Gainward free of any damage. Inside the package was the retail box shown below:

Inside and protected by molded foam were a quick start manual, four compact disks, an S-Video to RCA/composite adapter, DVI to D-Sub adapter, and
finally the card itself.

The software bundle is nothing spectacular, but they do include what I've heard to be a pretty good RPG – Arx Fatalis. Also included are WinDVD4, Muvee Auto Producer3, and Gainward's installation CD.

The card features a heatsink with fan covering the GPU, a seperate heatsink on the AGP-to-PCI Express bridge chip, and heatsinks on each pair of the eight BGA memory chips. The fan is positioned to the left of where the GPU sits in order to improve heat disappation from the core; common practice these days.

Compared to the Albatron PCX5750, the Gainward Ultra1800PCX is quite a bit larger. Not that it matters, but the IO connections on the Ultra1800PCX are also arranged differently compared to the Albatron.

The rear of the card leaves nothing to speak of.

The card has D-Sub, DVI, and s-Video outputs. It would be preferred to have dual DVI, but we're still waiting for that to become mainstream.

Looking down the opposite end gives us a view of the thermal pads under the memory heatsinks as well as the the fins under the GPU shroud.

Next thing I wanted to do was to get a look at the core used, memory chips, and the bridge chip. This required removing the heatsinks and cleaning off any thermal paste. You can see below that Gainward's got all bases covered: thermal pad, thermal gum, and thermal paste.

With the heatsinks and thermal gum removed you can see the GeForce 5900 XT core and the bridge chip catty-corner with it.

The memory used by this particular card were Hynix BGA packaged GDDR2 chips rated at 2.2 ns (900 MHz) and for operation at 2.5 V. Given these specifications it is clear that the memory used by Gainward has a lot of potential out of the box for higher frequencies.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following specifications were provided by Gainward for the Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample":

Minimum System Requirements:

Here's what Gainward has to say about the "Golden Sample" terminology:

What the "Golden Sample" means to us is that this card is shipped tested to run at 420/730 frequencies for added performance. Furthermore, Gainward warrentees the card for these clock frequencies.

Page 4 : Features

The GeForce FX family of GPUs feature the following:

The Ultra1800PCX is the typical GeForce FX 5900 XT GPU married with an AGP-to-PCI Express bridge. All the features remain the same and all the limitations remain the same. The only thing different is the interface to the system. It has already been shown that these early days of PCI Express will show little advantage in performance over the AGP bus, but in time that should change with more software and hardware adoption taking place. One immediate use of the extra bandwidth is being worked on by nVidia and is called SLI technology and allows multiple cards to work in parallel.

Page 5 : Installation

Installing a video card is very simple and requires little instruction. The only thing one needs to be sure of is that they have the proper slot available, and in this case we need a PCI Express slot. Simply slide in the card, fasten it in, hook up your desired output, and boot. Once you're booted up, you just need to install the drivers to get the most out of the hardware. For this installation I used the latest available drivers from nVidia's web site: Forceware 61.77.

The installation CD provided by Gainward includes their own tool they call EXPERTool. This tool is most important for those who do not know how to enable the Coolbits funciton in nVidia's drivers because it will provide options for enhanced mode and safe mode operation of the cards clock frequencies.

Page 6 : Overclocking

Built upon a .13u process and being this long in the cores lifecycle gives us hope for some impressive overclocking gains. To add to that the memory has come underclocked by 170 MHz. We were able to raise the core to a speed of only 430 MHz and the memory to a speed of 800 MHz without any stability issues. I was quite surprised that the core couldn't go much higher, but then again Gainward is already shipping these overclocked. The memory, while rated for 900 MHz was only able to run stable up to 800 MHz. Perhaps with more extreme cooling these Hynix chips could reach their expectations.

In the following sections where we benchmark this card, you can find the numbers from the stock PCX5900 clock of 350/550, enhanced mode 420/730, and max overclock settings of 430/800.

Page 7 : Testing

To test the performance of the Gainward FX PowerPack! Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample" we use some of today's new and popular games as well as some synthetic benchmarks. The line-up of games we tested with were Doom 3, Far Cry, and Unreal Tournament 2004. The synthetic tests used were Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 SE and 3DMark 2003. While some may argue the usefulness of synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark, we feel that they provide an accurate gauge of relative gaming performance among targeted generations. 3DMark 2001 SE provides a solid indication of performance one can expect compared to other cards in DirectX 7 and early DirectX 8 games. 3DMark 2003 provides us with a solid indication of performance one can expect compared to other cards in recent DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 titles. Just like any benchmark however, results for a single application are not the end-all be-all of performance judgement.

[editor's note]At the time of benchmarking and writing, 3D Mark 2005 was not yet available and hence excluded from the testing procedure.

The tests were conducted using the following systems:

And strictly for comparisons sake, we have an AGP system:

Page 8 : Performance (Synthetic)

These synthetic results give us an idea with what to expect in game performance. Our Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample" performs just between the 9700 Pro and the Albatron PCX5750 in 3DMark 2001SE – a fine enough score for older games. In 3DMark 2003 the Ultra1800PCX manages a descent score and establishes a small lead.

Page 9 : Performance (Standard Gaming)

The Ultra1800PCX doesn't perform so hot in Doom 3, but as the resolution rises the gap between it and the 9700 Pro narrows. The opposite can be said for both Far Cry and Unreal Tournament 2004 where we see it nearly neck-and-neck with the 9700 Pro only to see the gap widen as the resolution rises.

Page 10 : Performance (AA, AF, AA-AF Gaming)

In Doom 3, we have 8xAF results showing only a small drop in performance and in Doom 3 makes more of an impact on quality than AA without bring the game to unplayable levels (which is one reason for omitting such results). In Far Cry and Unreal Tournament though, we can see that 8xAF comes with a price and 4xAA an even greater price. Enabling both simulatinously in Far Cry results in bringing frame rates to unwanted levels, whereas Unreal Tournament 2004 manages to remain at a mostly playable level.

Page 11 : Image Quality

nVidia's Forceware drivers give you the option to force Anisotropic Filtering up to 8x and Anti-Aliasing up to 8xS (combination of 4x Rotated Grid Multi Sampling + 1×2 Super Sampling). Also available are adjustments to disable specific filtering optimizations and to force filtering methods such as Bilinear and Trilinear. It would definately be helpful to have a real-time preview of the effect disabling/enabling such settings have on the final image though.

Throughout gameplay and testing with this card there were no visual degradations in image quality that were noticable compared to an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro. Below are two images taken in Far Cry to compare quality. The screenshots were taken at 1024×768 resolution. Clicking on an image will show the full scene.

ATi 9700 Pro

Gainward FX PowerPack! Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample"

Page 12 : Conclusion

This brings us to a stopping point of our analysis on
Gainward's FX PowerPack! Ultra1800PCX "Golden Sample"
. The card performs like that of a mainstream offering, but I was honestly expecting more out of a video card that retails for $250. The last generation technology found in the Ultra1800PCX will soon be smashed by the 6600 and 6600GT GPUs in the next few months in that they will cost less, offer more features, and better it in performance. That's not to say that this is a bad card, but this card falls into a price/performance ratio that is six months old.

Right now, if I were to give anyone advice on buying a PCI Express graphics card I would tell them to wait if they can, but if they absolutely can't then do their wallet a favor and buy a PCI graphics card for cheap until the moment is right. That's an extreme, but honestly, no gamer is going to find much longevity in PCI Express cards utilizing last generation technology.

Advantages

PCI Express
DirectX 9.0
Great overclocking headroom

Disadvantages

Overpriced
Initial entry into platform isn't cheap
Slower on next generation games
Last generation technology