When PCI Express was first announced, it was a very exciting time. So many possibilities, and none of them had been quashed, as yet. As much as I wanted to have that first crack at holding and benchmarking the latest, I knew that there were other, just as important things that needed to be done. One of them being, getting the technology to a point that can be used by more than just the willing to empty the wallet enthusiasts. Today I am pleased to review a PCIe video card that is going to fit that tight budget (considering you are going to have to replace your Motherboard, CPU and possibly your Power Supply and Memory as well). I mean truly, how many of us have a spare $350+ lying around for a high end graphics card?

ASUS, one of the premiere names when it comes to motherboards, has also been tagged a premium name in the Graphics arena over the past several years. Not wanting to settle on one camp in the Graphics marketplace, you will find them with both NVIDIA and ATI based solutions. A smart move in this leap frog industry where if you are top dog today, chances are, a week from today, your not. Today I get to look over the mid-range contender from ASUS on the NVIDIA line, the ASUS Extreme N5900. Based on the NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5900 GPU carrying 128MB or 256MB of DDR all sitting on a PCIe interface. Lets look over the Specifications:

Overview

- HIS High Speed Interconnect technology (Full B/W translation with PCIe interface) - NVIDIA UltraShadow Enhances the performance of bleeding-edge games that use complex shadows - NVIDIA CineFX 2.0 Advanced vertex and pixel shaders allowing for - NVIDIA Intellisample The industries fastest anti-aliasing - NVIDIA nView Flexibility and control for multiple monitors - NVIDIA DVC 3.0 Digital vibrance control, giving you the tools to digitally manipulate your viewing to compensate for your environment

For the complete specifications and updates on the Extreme N5900, please check out the ASUS website. Interesting enough, even though the AGP version of this GPU clocks in at 400MHz, ASUS has chosen to run it at 375MHz. Other manufacturers have also changed the GPU clock rate on their PCIe solution, anywhere from 350MHz to the AGP versions 400MHz.

ASUS used HYNIX GDDR2 SRAM's for its memory. These are F-28 411A chips rated at 350MHz. You can also see here they have covered the HSI with a heatsink, I guess that gets hot as well?

The ASUS Extreme N5900

Unpacking the box you find a minimal thrills, get to the point, type of packaging, which is nice to see. The box isn't 10x the size of the card, loaded with all sorts of advertisements and the like, its the card, several CD's and enough packaging to protect said card. Once you have freed the card from it's antistatic wrapper you get an overall view that ASUS wasn't kidding around.

The HS/Fan combination on the GPU appear to be well thought out and the memory already has aluminum heat sinks applied. The memory is only on the front side of the card, so the back is bare with the exception of a few chips scattered here and there. The overall layout of the N5900 is that of purposeful design, the PCB appears neither busy nor haphazard.

Moving on to the included "goodies" we find a case full of CD's, first of which is your ASUS driver CD. The titles included are: ASUS Medi@show Slide shows for Desktops and Internet; ASUS DVD Player; Battle Engine aquila; GunMetal War Transformed; Games Power Includes Splinter Cell / Warcraft III / Big Mutha Truckers / BREED / Colin McRae Rally 3 / TOCA Race Driver; DeusEx Invisible War (2 CD's); Power Director 3DE Video Capture and Editing.

Not a bad package for a mid-ranged card...

Now that we have gone over the "what's included" information, lets install this thing into my mainboard.

Installation

Installation went without a hitch, as with most PCIe video cards, this one snapped in nicely and felt snug with little to no play, a definite improvement over the AGP connection. Once installed, its time to boot up and install the drivers.

The driver CD contains the current (when boxed) NVIDIA Detonator driver, along with an ASUS driver built specifically for this card. I opted to try the latest Detonator drivers from the web, 61.77. I will be testing with the included ASUS specific drivers as well, to see if there is any advantage to doing so. Also on the driver disk: WDM Capture Driver allows you to capture analog stream through the S-Video port; Smart Doctor Utility that monitors the graphics card condition and, according to ASUS, significantly cools down the GPU. It also allows you to adjust the cards clock settings for both GPU and memory

We also have the ASUS Video Security Appears to be used to sense a change in a video region, this is for video cameras deployed in a security environment, which is out of the realm of this review. ASUS Digital VCR allows you to watch and record TV programs on your computer, provided you have an external receiver, as there is no tuner on this card, but it does allow the use of TIVO/DVR type functionality. ASUS GameFace allows you to not only talk to your opponent, but see them cringe as you annihilate them.

Testing

All demo's were run at HQ unless otherwise stated to allow us to stress the card out as much as possible. Each test was run 3 times with the average of those 3 being the result. If a test has 2 runs similar and one completely out of line, I rerun all 3 tests disposing of the previous results (however I do make a note of it). I tried to hit the sweet spot when it comes to resolution, 800x600 on newer games only, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 on all the games. I know there are some of you out there that must have 1600x1200, the newer games can simply not be played at that resolution on this tier of video card and it is the majority of the readers that play within the resolutions I will be testing.

The systems I will be performing the demo's on is as follows:

Intel 540 LGA775 (2.8 GHz)
ASUS P5GDC Deluxe
1GB Kingston HyperX PC2-5400
WD WD800JD / 80GB SATA 7200RPM
ASUS Extreme N5900 - 128MB
Hitachi CML175-B LCD Monitor
Windows XP SP2
Detonator 61.77

V.S.

Intel P4 2.8E (socket 478)
Abit AI7
1GB Kingston HyperX PC-4300
Hitachi 80GB SATA 7200RPM
ATI 9600XT - 128MB
Hitachi CML175-B LCD Monitor
Windows XP SP2
Catalyst 4.9

V.S.

Intel P4 2.8E (socket 478)
Abit AI7
1GB Kingston HyperX PC-4300
Hitachi 80GB SATA 7200RPM
Chaintech Apogee FX5600 Ultra
Detonator 61.77

I wanted to test against these two cards for a reason, and that is, a lot of you probably upgraded your video card within the last year, and these two cards were very popular in that timeframe. Basically what I am showing you is; Is it worth the money to upgrade from what I purchased just a year ago to this new mid-range graphics card? The ATI Radeon 9600XT was allowed to run with the Catalyst OverDrive capability enabled. Hopefully giving you a real world condition, as I ran mine with this enabled 24x7.

The games:
Doom 3 - Of course, probably the hardest engine on cards today

Unreal Tournament 2004 - Visually intense and very popular

Far Cry - Still a struggle with high end cards, graphically intensive

Call of Duty - An older Q3 engine game, albeit modified to the hilt, but none the less popular

Quake III Arena - Yes, she is old, and with Doom 3, getting older, but a lot of people still play it

Pain Killer - I wont be benchmarking Pain Killer, but going over playability (no built in demo to allow for benchmarking accurately).

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