Overclocker Cafe - Chaintech FX71-GFFX 5600Ultra

Chaintech FX71 Apogee (GeForce FX 5600 Ultra)

Manufacturer: Chaintech
Supplied By: Chaintech
Street Price: ~$215.00

by Brian Tiller (8/25/2003)

Introduction

Yo dudes, what's up? I need you guys to do me a small favor here before we start on this review. Please send Dean a get well card, and ask him to forgive me, would ya? See, when Chaintech sent us this review sample, well, Dean and I kinda had ourselves a scuffle over who would get to review it and as you can see, I won!! Stick around and you'll see what we were going at it over.

While the GeForce FX5600 isn't a new chipset, Chaintech has gone to extraordinary lengths to raise their product above the rest of the field. Sporting such features as the gas turbine technology for cooling the card as well as bundling a lot of extras with it, they've certainly grabbed our attention here at the 'Cafe. So without further adieu, here we go!

What you get

Actually, I think it might be easier to say "What don't you get?" This is without question, the best bundled video I have personally had the opportunity to handle. As you can see, the box that it comes in is quite a bit bigger than normal. It even has a carrying handle on it. I could probably talk about the box itself for at least another paragraph, but lets get to the goodies. Once you open the box you're going to need a large area to put the stuff that you pull out.

See what I mean about a lot of stuff? In addition to the cables, which include an S-video, composite and a VIVO cable, there is the DVI to VGA converter that is becoming pretty standard here lately. But that's not all. You can also see here that they have included an extra 4-pin Molex power cable w/ a splitter, very cool. See that big CD case? Well in addition to the driver CD, we've also got WinDVD Creator, WinDVD 6 Channel, Win Rip, 3Deep, a 5 in 1 game pack CD which has Age of Wonders 2, Serious Sam 2, Rally Trophy, Max Payne and Tropico.

And check out the cool Anti-Static brush too. Just incase you're like me and want to occasionally pop that case open and polish this baby! This last item is pretty nifty too. They call it the 'Q Ball', which is actually a nice little monitor cleaner. And believe it or not, it works pretty well too, but I found it's true purpose......spouse chaser! Next time your wife pokes her head in to see what you're doin...BAM, right in the noggin. Just remember to run like hell (LOL)!

Specifications

After you get through this, I'll show you what the card looks like, ok?

0.13u process technology
128-bit memory interface
256-bit graphics architecture
88 Million vertices/ sec
1.4 Billion texels/ sec fill rate
12.8 GB/sec memory bandwidth
CineFX Shading Architecture
400 MHz engine clock
800 MHz memory clock
400 MHz internal RAMDAC
128-bit studio-precision color
High-performance, high-precision 3D and 2DIntellisample Technology rendering engine
Advanced Display Pipeline with full nView Capabilities
Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
NVIDIA nView multi-display technology
Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions up to 1024x768 without the need for panning with built-in Macrovision copy protection
DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
Support for dual-link DVI for compatibility with next-generation flat panel displays with resolutions greater than 1600x1200 without the need for reduced blanking

As you can see the 5600 GPU is made using the .13 micron technology instead of the older .15 micron process like the 5200 series. Something else to note is that the Chaintech card is making use of NVidia's improvement on the core and memory clocks up from 350/700 to 400/800MHz on the core and memory clock.