As much as we can all drool when we look at the impressive benchmark numbers from some of the high end cards, reality sets in when you checkup your bank account numbers just before shopping. If you decide that you can try going without food for a couple weeks, that's probably a good indicator that the 300FPS monster is not for you.

By the same token, your current video card is starting to choke, so an upgrade is in order. With games like Half-Life 2 on the horizon, your old GeForce 3 isn't going to play the game the way the developers meant it to. Although a FX5200 supports the effects, it simply lacks the raw power to play at acceptable framerates.

The GeForce FX5600 Ultra is likely one GPU that can get the job done. On paper, it appears to have what it takes to handle some of the more strenuous games, and the price isn't terribly prohibitive. Today, we'll be taking a close look at the XFX FX5600 Ultra and determine if it's a card worth picking up.

Specifications

CineFX Engine
High-Precision Graphics
Intellisample Technology
nView Multi-display Technology
AGP 8X
Digital Vibrance Control (DVC)
Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support
400MHz RAMDACs
DVI Support
Integrated TV Encoder
Integrated Full Hardware MPEG-2 Decoder
New 64-phase Video Scaler
Architected for Cg

You can grab the .

The XFX GeForce FX5600 Ultra

The XFX FX5600 Ultra is a rather large card, though not as big as some of nVidia's past mid to high-end cards. The grey/blue PCB sets itself apart from the generic greens we're used to seeing, and the silver heatsinks stand out rather nicely.

A rather larger heatsink covers the FX5600 Ultra GPU. The finish of the heatsink is quite nice, and kudos to XFX for installing a matching silver coloured fan as well. Heatsinks cover all the ram modules on the card, though I'm unsure why smaller (or lower) heatsinks were used on the ram modules on the back of the card.

As with most higher end cards, be it from ATI or nVidia, you'll need to plug in a power source to use the card. A standard molex connection is all you need, though XFX does not include any molex splitter. This could be a problem if you're out of connections, but given that most of the modern PSUs provide more than enough of these connections, this shouldn't be a problem. A 300W PSU is the minimum XFX suggests, but as we always say, more power won't hurt, but the quality of the PSU is of importance.

We did run into an odd snag with the ABIT NF7-S v2.0 and an Antec TruePower 350W PSU where system would not boot two times out of ten. It ended up that a slight bump in AGP voltage to 1.6v remedied the situation, and we experienced no problems after. I can't say if this is going to be the case for all similar setups, as it could have easily be any one of our components, but it's something for you to keep in mind.

You got your standard I/O options here. There is a DVI connection for LCDs, a 15-pin VGA connection, and a TV-Out connection. nView Multi-display Technology is supported (based on the GPU technology, and XFX's packaging setup), so multi-display users are fully covered here.

Plenty of cables are provided, along with a DVI-to-VGA adapter incase you only have two CRTs. You also have a couple manuals, and a driver CD. There is no game package included. Whether this bothers you or not depends on your current game collection. This saves XFX and yourself some money, and in my experience, most games included with cards are something most gamers already have.

Test Setup

ABIT NF7-S v2.0: AMD Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, XFX FX5600 Ultra, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, Detonator FX 45.23.

ABIT NF7-S v2.0: AMD Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, Chaintech FX5600 Ultra, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, Detonator FX 45.23.

Test Software will be:

Code Creatures
Specviewperf
Unreal Tournament 2003
Jedi Knight 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Splinter Cell

The comparison video card will be the Chaintech FX5600 Ultra. Benchmarks will be shown with and without AntiAliasing and Aninsotropic Filtering. Settings for both cards are "Balanced".

CPU clock speed will be 11.5x181, totalling 2083MHz. The ram is running at 2-3-3-5 timings at 200MHz.

Code Creatures

This is a DX8 benchmark that makes good use of vertex and pixel shaders. Given that these cards are DX9 parts, we can get an idea of how it will handle an older video shader specification.

Code Creatures @ 1024

Code Creatures @ 1280

Without overstating the obvious, you won't find many differences between FX5600 Ultra boards, so look into the best bang for the buck. The XFX performs alright at 1024, but takes a nosedive once we start increasing the AA and AF quality.

SpecViewPerf7

Video cards aren't just for fun and games, and I'm sure some developers and multimedia authors are curious about how the XFX FX5600 Ultra would do in a professional OpenGL environment.

Professional level OpenGL isn't something the FX5600 is designed for. Both cards perform within mere percentage points of one another here.

Unreal Tournament 2003

We used the from [H]ard|OCP and selected the high quality batch run at all resolutions. We'll be presenting Antalus, Inferno, and Citadel benchmarks, with AA/AF on and off.

Antalus @ 1024, Max Detail

Antalus @ 1280, Max Detail

With no AA and AF enabled, the XFX is very playable at 1280x1024. You can move up to 2xAA/8xAF at 1024x768, but I wouldn't go much higher than that if you're playing online.

Inferno @ 1024, Max Detail

Inferno @ 1280, Max Detail

Inferno is a little rougher on video cards, though 2xAA/8xAF at 1024 is still playable. Things are a bit choppier at 1280, but if you keep AA/AF off, you should be fine.

Citadel @ 1024, Max Detail

Citadel @ 1280, Max Detail

Pretty much as the previous benchmarks. From the UT2003 scores, we can gather that 2xAA/8xAF is really as high as you can go while staying above 60 frames per second.

Jedi Knight II

Jedi Knight II is a little more CPU limited than video card limited, but make no mistake, a fast video card is required if you still want good framerates at high resolutions and all the effects turned on.

Jedi Knight II @ 1024, Max Detail

Jedi Knight II @ 1280, Max Detail

Based on an older game engine, Jedi Knight II is much more forgiving at 2xAA/8xAF. There is hardly any drop... maybe 3fps at most.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Powered by the Quake 3 Engine, like Jedi Knight 2, it is heavily modified. We used the Checkpoint demo, which is loaded with explosions and multiplayer action.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein @ 1024, Max Detail

Return to Castle Wolfenstein @ 1280, Max Detail

Wolfenstein's Checkpoint demo is one of the more intense Quake 3 Engine tests, and the XFX handles it fairly well at no AA/AF and 2xAA/8xAF. Forget about playing at anything much higher though.

Splinter Cell

New to our test bench is UbiSoft's 3rd person action game, Splinter Cell. We used the , and ran the cards through the gamut.

Splinter Cell @ 1024, Max Detail

Splinter Cell @ 1280, Max Detail

At both 1024x768 and 1280x1024, the card struggles. We're a little concerned about the performance, as upcoming games will be at the very least, as graphically intense as Splinter Cell. Oh well, I guess that's what overclocking is for.

Overclocking

Overclocking should net you some extra performance, but beware of the risks. Never jump straight to the highest overclock, and make sure you move up a little at a time.

2D Speeds	3D Speeds

Like the FX5900 is there are two clock speeds depending on what you are doing. Stock 2D speed is 235MHz Core/800MHz Memory, while the 3D speed is bumped up to 400/800. There isn't really much point in overclocking the 2D, so concentrating on the 3D, we managed a final overclock of 435/860.

Overclocked

Overclocking is nice and all, but let's look at some numbers and see what kind of performance we gained from OCing.

Splinter Cell OC Results

Compared to our stock speed Splinter Cell numbers, we see an increase of about 9FPS at no AA. Quite impressive.

Image Quality

NoAA	4xAA/8xAF

3D image quality was pretty good, but not quite up to the standards set by ATI. Compared to past generations of nVidia cards, the XFX FX5600 Ultra is much improved. AntiAliasing quality is very good as well.

We loaded up a 1600x1200 image we normarlly use in our video card reviews. I also pulled up several word documents with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The documents used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1600x1200 @ 85Hz on a Dell rebranded 21" Trinitron.

Scores are subjective, but having worked with many video cards here at the Lair, we got a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.

Text rendering was near the 9700's levels, but drops off at smaller white text on dark backgrounds. The bitmap we used rendered colours correctly, but not as rich as ATI.

Final Words

Our first impressions were "Hmm, interesting packaging". Our second impression when opening it up was "Hmph, not much in the way of extra software". Our third impression when looking at the card itself was "Damn! This card looks sweet". After benchmarking and overclocking, as well as typing up this very review with the card running in my work rig, what are our impressions overall?

Well, to start, performance was very good when you consider the target market and price point. At the XFX FX5600 Ultra is competitively priced. A quick look on shows most FX5600 Ultras fall within this price range, so XFX isn't pricing themselves out of the market. For $200, you're getting some excellent performance in many of todays games, though the Splinter Cell performance was severly lacking. The games of tomorrow? I can't say for sure, but I consider a card of this caliber to be the bare minimum for Half-Life 2 when it arrives later this Fall.

Overclocking went very well. Credit to XFX's additional cooling options are in order here, as the end result was a very stable OC'd card that improved its benchmarking performance noticably.

The lack of 3rd party software may be a plus or minus for some of you. If it makes for a cheaper package, I'm all for it, and in many cases, the games don't even demonstrate the abilities of the hardware. Also, as fast as the card is for the money, we've seen here that the Radeon 9600 Pro still tends to surpass the FX5600 Ultra in many benchmarks.

For the majority of todays games, the XFX FX5600 Ultra will do the job. With the overclocking potential, you should be ok for upcoming action games... or Splinter Cell. With it's competitive price, solid design, and decent performance, I doubt many of you will regret picking this card up.

Pros: Good performance, efficient cooling, well priced.

Cons: Minimal software bundle, under 20fps Splinter Cell performance.

Bottom Line: In the end, if you're in the market for a new video card, with a reasonable price, and plan on playing some of the more graphically intense games, the XFX FX5600 Ultra would make a fine choice. If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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