Overclocking
Because nVidia doesn't include any sort of overclocking utility with their benchmarks anymore, I used PowerStrip to set the core and memory clocks. The actual testing that I used for assuring the stability of the card at a given clockspeed was to turn anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering up, thereby forcing the card to render and page into its RAM as many frames per second as possible. If there was an instability in the card at a clockspeed, running the card this way would most certainly show me artifacts.
Being as this is a video card and not a CPU with some monster heatsink, and because the FX line of cards runs hot, I didn't expect to get a killer overclock on this card. As mentioned before in the specifications (subsection Performance,) the GPU clock runs at 325 Mhz, and the memory runs at 550 Mhz. I was able to boost the GPU up to 360 Mhz, and the memory to 650Mhz stable, a 35 Mhz overclock on the core, and a 100 Mhz effective overclock on the ram (it's actually only a 50 Mhz overclock on the ram, but because the card uses DDR RAM, it is treated as an effective 100 Mhz).
The numbers are impressive enough - at 1024x768 we see an increase of more than 30 FPS on antalus with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering off, all the way down to 3 FPS at 1600x1200 on inferno with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering all the way up.
Image Quality Testing
For image quality testing, I used the Radeon 9700, as I don't have a current ATI budget card, and the image quality should be consistent throughout any given vendor's at the same quality settings. So although 4 sample anti-aliasing would be different on an ATI card and an nVidia card, on two nVidia cards, 4 sample anti-aliasing should be the same.
MSI FX5600-VTDR128
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
The truth is that both images look great. The anti-aliasing difference between the two is minor, and I believe that ATI's images look a bit better - but you can decide that one for yourself, as this analysis is extremely subjective.
Final Words
It looks like the FX5600 is quite the Ti4200 killer, but there is a reason I didn't use a more powerful card for benchmarking. No, it's not because I don't have anything more powerful; it's because the FX5600 was not designed to compete with the 9700 or 9800. It was designed to compete with the 9600 (which I happen to not have.) If I ever do get a 9600, I will be sure to update this review, but until then, all that I can say about this card is that it beats the heck out of its predecessor; which is what it was designed to do - beat the previous generation card into the ground, while still managing to be affordable.
Pros: Cheap, Great Bundle, Will run today's games well - great bang for buck.
Cons: Isn't designed to run tomorrow's games at high framerates, could use some more RAM.
Bottom Line: If you're looking for a solution to play games for the next year, and don't need all the bells and whistles in games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3, this just might be the card for you. If you got any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
