OVERCLOCKING:
This being my first look at a Geforce FX card I was very interested to see what the overclocking potential of the card was. With previous generations of NVIDIA cards the lower end cards have been know to clock up to very near the higher end parts. For example in some cases the TI4200’s were reaching TI 4600 speeds. With the FX card I used the coolbits registry hack to enable overclocking within the driver. This is how the NVIDIA clockspeed panel looks:

The first thing that struck me was the very useful Auto Detect feature. This is a great idea for the user who is beginning to overclock their system however is worried that they may damage their components. Clicking the auto detect button results in the card testing a safe frequency that does not produce any errors. In our review sample the auto detect found maximum clocks of 338mhz core and 427mhz on the memory. Running both versions of 3dmark on the raised clocks showed no errors and the system remained completely stable. Raising each by 2mhz resulted in visual artefacts and so the maximum stable increase was to 339mhz core and 428mhz on the memory. Here’s how the change affected the 3dmark results when no AA or AF is used.

Resolution	Version	3dmark2001	3dmark2003
1024x768		9736 (increase 321 marks)	2510 (increase 151 marks)

The other feature of the FX drivers is the ability to choose the speeds for 2d and 3d individually, so you can specify to overclock only for the demanding 3d applications you use – this should increase the lifespan of the card over one which is overclocked at all times.

Image Quality
The first thing that struck me after installing the card was that the 2d image quality has greatly improved from the Geforce 4. Colourful desktop backgrounds show much more clarity than previous NVIDIA cards and in DVD playback again the picture quality is more crisp and defined. Although the image quality is improved I still feel there is some room for improvement. For example using the desktop picture “crystal” which is supplied with Windows XP the background is grainy in places where it should be smooth. Moving on to 3d image quality I must say I was hard pushed to see any difference between the quality of the FX and the previous generation of NVIDIA cards. I found the FX’s 3d quality to be a lot harsher than I am accustomed to, it was by no means bad however the wow factor I have experienced with recent cards was just not there. For example in 3dmark2001 SE’s advanced pixel shader test the water did not look as real as it should. Looking at actual games and UT2003 with 4xAA and 8xAF looked very nice.

Conclusion
Make no mistake, the PNY GeForce FX 5600 256mb is a good card. It brings 256mb of dedicated graphics memory to the masses, has an excellent warranty and good 2d image quality. In the most recent games such as Command And Conquer: Generals, UT2003 and Splinter Cell it has not trouble in achieving very playable frames per second. Performance hits experienced when using AA have decreased as has the performance hit when using AF. As mentioned earlier you get a decent bundle for your £145 and an excellent warranty.

The only real concern I had with the card is that the image quality, although improved from the GeForce 4, still has some way to go to match the ATI Radeon cards in the same price bracket. If you find a good deal online you may also be able get faster performance from a similarly priced Radeon.

Who should be interested in this card?
Being honest I could not recommend the card to a user who currently has a GeForce 4 TI card. I would however say to any budget conscious user looking to upgrade from a Geforce 4 MX or older GeForce card to a new NVIDIA card that this should definitely be on their shortlist. 256mb of memory will no doubt be used in future games and the card has support for the DirectX 9 features which will also be used by those games.

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