Gainward Geforce FX 5800 Ultra:

This card comes in a huge box, it is stuffed with all kinds of extra's. But you do pay for them. In Belgium the retail price is approx. €700. Is it worth it? Thanks to PointerX I am able to find out. He let me put this fine piece of craftsmanship through a couple of quick benchmarks!

The card

I hope you like the colour, at least you can say that it's mighty flashy!



The backside is covered by a huge heat spreader, guess that DDR-II memory needs lots of chilling



As with the Radeon 9700 Pro, this video card claims a power connector from your PSU, nVidia chose to go with the 4-pin connector and Gainward provided a splitter in the box so that you won't lose any connectors




The Y-Power-Cable splitter

Flow-FX

Flow-FX is nVidia buzz-word for their cooling system. Both the GPU and memory get hot really fast and in order to keep the FX from crashing due to overheating they had to design a larger heat sink/fan setup. This ended up in a grotesque and loud system that takes up a whole PCI Slot on your motherboard:



It is far from perfect, it is loud, only the front of the card is actively cooled, the back however also gets hot quickly and having a fan in the side-panel of your case is no longer a luxury with this video card. The Gainward FX features onboard temperature sensors for both ambient and GPU temps. Of course these results need to be taken with a grain of salt, as we don’t know how accurate this information is.

The installed Sunon fan on the Gainward FX has the following characteristics



Power Current: 0.18 AMP
Power Consumption: 2.2 WATTS
Speed: 5600 RPM
Airflow: 6.2 CFM
Noise: 44.6 dBA

If you think 44.6 dBA is silent, you thought wrong! (A 60mm Delta fan running at 6000rpm produces ~40 dBA)

The fan is placed on this massive copper heat sink that covers the FX GPU:



The backplane is held in place with metal clips which can be quite easily removed using a screwdriver:



Thermal grease has been applied on all the DDR-II memory chips for optimal heat transferral:







How does it perform?

Room Temp: 21°C

Temperature during desktop/2d work:
Ambient: 37°C
GPU: 42°C

Temperature during 3D Gaming:
Ambient: 43°C
GPU: 54°C

The results might not seem extreme, but this was measured in a well ventilated room in a case with good airflow. Placing this card in a closed case without case fans will surely up the card's temperature by a good margin.

Lets see how it compares in dimensions to the Geforce 4 graphics card line-up from nVidia...