Driverheaven: POINT OF VIEW 5900 XT 128MB AND SAPPHIRE 9600 XT 128MB

POINT OF VIEW 5900 XT 128MB AND SAPPHIRE 9600 XT 128MB

Review: Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson
Editor/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

A few months ago we reviewed the Geforce FX 5700 Ultra, at the time it was Nvidia’s direct competitor to the Radeon 9600XT. At that time we were one of the few websites to suggest that the 9600XT was the better card and that the 5700Ultra just wasn’t quite good enough. Today we have our first look at the 5900XT, Nvidia’s new challenger for the mainstream market. Retailing at £170/$200 which is just above the 9600XT at £140 and the 9800 at £200 it should make a very interesting product. We also have a look at Sapphires 9600XT, Sapphire is my number one choice of powered by ATI products and I’m very interested to see how their card stacks up against the 5900XT.

Point Of View 5900 XT

Point Of View were a Nvidia partner that I was unaware of until recently. For such a new company I was very surprised with the quality of the product. The card itself is based on a bright red PCB. The cooler is jet black with the POV logo on it and there is a silver trim on the top of the card which firstly looks very stylish and secondly works well in assisting removal of the card. Included in the package is :

Manual
Driver Disk
Power DVD 5
Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness
Molex Extension
S-Video Cables
DVI convertor

Installation of the card was as expected, nothing out of the ordinary.

Sapphire Radeon 9600XT

Features:

128MB/256MB DDR high performance two-channel DDR memory interface accelerates the latest 3D applications
Highly Optimized 128-bit 2D engine with support for new WindowsXP GDI extensions
3rd Generation Visual Processing Unit (VPU) comprised of 4 rendering pipelines and 2 geometry engines
Fully compliant with PC 2002 requirements
Supports the AGP 8X and AGP 4x standard
Full support for DirectX® 9.0 and the latest OpenGL® functionality
New SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 technology allows users to experience complex, movie-quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 technology enhances image quality by removing jagged edges and bringing out fine texture detail, without compromising performance
128-bit floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness
BUNDLED with HALF-LIFE 2 full retail version in addition to other hot titles depending on your region.

The Sapphire 9600XT comes in shiny metallic box with a window on the rear to view your card. The card itself differs from the reference ATI model in several ways. Firstly it is based on a black PCB. The cooling is also completely different. Gone is the 9700 style core cooler and instead we have a sapphire branded cooler. The card also varies from the ATI design as it is clocked at 500mhz core and 325mhz ram.

Included in the box is: S-video and composite video cable, DvI-VGA dongle, power splitter, Sapphire Redline overclocking utility, manual, power DVD XP, Drivers/Demo’s, Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness and finally a Half-Life 2 voucher.

Next: Test Setup