Inno3D Tornado GeForce FX 5900 - 128mb

The first question you have is what exactly is the difference between the 5900 and the 5900 Ultra?  Well, there are really only two effective differences, core clock speed and the amount of memory onboard.  The 5900's core runs at 400MHz as opposed to the 5900 Ultra's 450MHz.  Secondly, the 5900 Ultra sports twice the memory as the 5900, 256mb compared to the 128 on the 5900.  These are the same basic card except one is super charged.

As far as features are concerned, the 5900/Ultra has a few more bells and whistles than do the 5600/Ultra and 5200/Ultra cards.  The first of these is the CineFX 2.0 Engine.  NVidia claims that the 2.0 Engine has twice the floating point pixel shader power as the standard CineFX engine.  Another difference is the implementation of the Intellisample HCT.  This is also billed as having a 50% increase over NVidia's Intellisample Technology that comes standard on the 5600/Ultra based products.  What this means, at least on paper, is that the antialaising aspects of the 5900 series should provide superior image quality at a lower cost in processing power to the system (higher frame rates.)  Lastly is the UltraShadow Technology.  This is claimed to greatly accelerate shadow generation in games to really give you as lifelike an experience as possible.

What you get

Opening up the Inno3D 5900 box greeted us with the 5900, clad in one BIG heatsink.  Also included with the Inno3D Tornado 5900 is a DVI to VGA adapter, S-Video cable, manual and software bundle.  The software bundle looks to be Inno3D's standard "Mega Pack 2003"  Inside the Mega Pack is a full version of Comanche 4, five demos to include Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Red Faction, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Vietcong and Black Hawk Down.  Several utilities are here in addition to the requisite driver CD.  These are InterVideo's WinDVD Software Player, Win DVD Creator, VCD/DVD Capture and Authoring Software and the shareware version of 3D Mark 2003.

The card

I'm not sure if you can see it in the picture or not but the GPU heatsink is that tiny thing labeled Inno3D.  The design people at Inno3D have gone with the half sandwich cooler as is on the Inno3D 5200.  More on the sink in a second.  Flipping the card over we see no cooling for the reverse side of the GPU or memory as some VGA makers have been becoming more and more fond of.

DVI, S-Video and a standard VGA port give you plenty of options for viewing.  The GeForce FX line, like most other high end cards, sucks more power than the AGP slot can provide so you will need to plug in a four pin Molex to the rear of the card.

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