PNY GEFORCE FX 5600

DRIVER DISCUSSION:
Since we received the PNY FX 5600 two weeks ago I have spent a great deal of time looking at 3 of the most recent driver sets. It should be noted that the two sets not used in this review (43.40 and 44.03) caused various image quality concerns. Some were minor however some were serious which not only lessened the quality of the end user experience they also skewed the benchmark results for the card. In the latest beta drivers, from an end user perspective, these issues appear to have been addressed. How exactly these issues were addressed we have not had time to investigate for this review. I’m sure there will be many investigations into this when the drivers leave the beta stage by sites far more qualified to do so than us. So for this review we shall be using the recently leaked 44.65 beta drivers.

Test System

Hardware:
PNY FX 5600 256mb
Athlon XP 2600+ (333fsb) at 2088mhz
Leadtek K7NCR18DM N-force 2 Motherboard
2x256mb DDR 333 (twinmos)
Western Digital 200gb IDE 100 7200 rpm Hard Drive with 8mb Cache.
NEC ND-1100A DVD+RW Drive
Compaq DVD-116
Alps Floppy Drive
Q-tec Dual Fan Gold 550w PSU
Compaq MV740 Monitor

Software:
Windows XP Pro SP1
Direct X 9.0a
Nvidia Detonator 44.65 (beta)
Nforce drivers v2.03
3d Mark 2001SE
3d Mark 2003 build 330
GL Excess 1.2b
Codecreatures 1.0
Unreal Tournament 2003 build 2225

The test system was built from scratch. A format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP pro was installed. Following the completion of the install the N-force drivers were installed and I visited Windows Update. The only updates applied were SP1 and Direct X 9.0a. Following a reboot the detonator 44.65 drivers were installed and all graphics options were set to best image quality. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented.

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Each benchmark was performed 3 times and the middle result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables which follow. After changing any Anti-Aliasing (AA) or Anisotropic Filtering (AF) setting and before a benchmark was run the system was rebooted.