Albatron GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

In Action

Installation was without difficulties with the exception of the PCB's length locking off two DIMMs in our test bed, all went well.  The card's length won't be a problem to the average user because I don't expect most folks will be swapping memory in and out of their system every other day.  Powering the 5950 UV up gave us a little blue surprise.  A small blue LED, positioned between the three fans.  It provides a nice blue glow to the translucent fan blades.  Unfortunately, the picture below does not do justice to the LEDs brightness.

Performance

A quick aside before we delve into our testing results.  No matter what anyone says, we are all biased to some small degree with expectations and preferences.  Before we benched the 5950 UV, I had fully accepted that the Radeon 9800 XT we were going to use as a comparison card was going to eat it's NVidia counterpart's lunch from everything I've read elsewhere.  Let me prime you for our testing by saying what we expect doesn't always prove to be fact at the end of the day.

As already mentioned, we choose our VisionTek Radeon 9800 XT as a comparison card.  On it we ran the ATi Catalyst 3.9 driver.  For our Albatron 5950 Ultra, we ran the most recent NVidia Detonator Driver, the v53.03.  The results in the graphs to follow are the sum of five runs per benchmark with the highest and lowest score being thrown out.  The remaining three were then averaged and that is what you see here.

Benchmarks
 
• Unreal Tournament 2003 using the Hard|OCP's benchmarking program.
• Serious Sam: Second Encounter
• AquaMark v3
• Quake III Arena using the Guru of 3D's Q3Bench program.
• Code Creatures
• Futuremark's 3Dmark2001 SE (330)
• Futuremark's 3Dmark2003 (340)

Test Bed

• ABIT NF7 (nForce2) Mainboard
• AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (400MHz FSB)
• (2) 256 mb sticks of Corsair XMS3500
• Maxtor 80gb IDE HDD
• Generic 52x CD-ROM
• Windows XP Professional with all patches and service packs.

Now with all that said and done, on with the show.

Results

Starting us off is what has become the main course of all real world benchmarks at present, Unreal Tournament 2003.  We selected three maps and ran each in a speed and a quality mode under Direct3D.  The three maps being Antalus, Inferno and Citadel.

So far the results are what we expected.  While the 9800 XT isn't blowing the doors off the 5950 Ultra, it is taking a decisive lead.  However, from this point forward you will understand my comment about expectations I mentioned just a minute ago.
 

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Pg.1 - Introduction
Pg.2 - The Card
Pg.3 - Testing (UT2003)
Pg.4 - (UT2003 / Serious Sam: TSE)
Pg.5 - (Quake III, FutureMark, Code Creatures, AquaMark)
Pg.6 - Overclocking
Pg.7 - Image Quality and Conclusion