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Inno3D Tornado FX5200 128MB
Review Date: June 10, 2003
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: InnoVISION
At the time of writing, this card is available on Pricewatch.com for just $68 USD including shipping, making it the least expensive card I have ever reviewed. This is an important factor to keep in mind throughout the rest of the review, because although it may be light weight compared to it's big brothers, it packs a hell of a punch for the price!
Packaging:
Since this is such an inexpensive card, I expected to commercial package to be not much more that a white box and drive CD, so I was very pleasantly surprised to see the card arrive in a beautifully designed box, packed with extras! The contents of the package include:
- The card itself.
- The driver CD.
- WinDVD 4.
- WinDVD Creator (DVD burning software!).
- Comanche 4 full version.
- 3DMark03
- Games Try-out CD - Includes demos of: Delta Force- Blackhawk Down, Ghost Recon, Red Faction, Serious Sam- The Second Encounter, and Vietcong.
- DVI - to - VGA adapter.
- Svideo - to RCA adapter.
- User manual.
Features:
- Powered by nVidia GeForce FX 5200 GPU
- 0.15 Micron Process Technology
- CineFX™ engine
- 128-bit studio-precision color
- Architected for Cg
- AGP 8X -2.1GB/s bandwidth to system
- NVIDIA®'s nView™ multi-display technology
- Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
- 350MHz RAMDACs support 2048x1536 resolution at 75MHz
- 4 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
- Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0
- New 64-phase Video Scaler
- Highest DVI output upto 1600x1200
- Integrated TV encoder up to 1024x768 resolution
- Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 decoder
- nVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
- OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support
The GeForce FX Family Tree:
GeForce FX series |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
| Name |
5800 Ultra
|
5800
|
5600 Ultra
|
5600
|
5200 Ultra
|
5200
|
| Fill Rate (AA Sample/sec) |
4.0 Billion
|
3.2 Billion
|
1.4 Billion
|
1.4 Billion
|
1.3 Billion
|
1.0 Billion
|
| Verticles/sec |
200 Million
|
160 Million
|
88 Million
|
81 Million
|
81 Million
|
63 Million
|
| Memory Bandwidth |
16.0 GB/s
|
12.8 GB/s
|
11.2 GB/s
|
8.8 GB/s
|
10.4 GB/s
|
6.4 GB/s
|
| Memory Interface |
128Bit DDR-II
|
128Bit DDR-I
|
||||
Interesting numbers aren't they? Notice that the FX 5600 is only approximately 40% faster than the 5200, but the 5800 takes a huge leap and almost triples the performance of the FX5600... This is due in no small part to the use of DDR II memory, but the FX 5800 GPU is a much faster processor.
A Closer Look:
The first thing that catches your attention is the gigantic aluminum heatsink that covers most of the card. While it is impressive looking, I found it to be a bit inefficient as a cooling solution because although it has a large surface area, it only touches the GPU and not the memory. Even though the heatsink covers the memory, it doesn't actually touch the memory. There is a small gap between the memory chips and heatsink, resulting in the memory getting no cooling at all and no way to cool them with aftermarket sinks. The huge heatsink is held in place by 2 plastic retainers. I accidently popped one off during the review which shows that Inno3D could have definitely devised a better solution, but after reattaching the heatsink, all was well.
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