BFG GeForce FX 5600

It's time once again to play the name game with NVIDIA's video cards! For those playing the home version, today's contestants are MSI's Ti4800 SE and BFG's FX 5600. As you may recall from previous episodes, the Ti4800SE is a Ti4400 with AGP 8X support. The Ti4200 has proven to be a very popular contestant amongst bargain seekers. It's fast out of the box and overclocks well. Although our review of the Ti4800 didn't reveal any performance advantage for AGP 8X in today's crop o' games, it was still a very good performer at a nice price.

Our new player, the FX 5600, sits about half of the way up the current FX series card lineup. The FX 5200 is the bottom tier, followed by the 5200 Ultra, then by the 5600 (roughly occupying the space previously taken by the Ti4400). By virtue of being an FX and having a higher number in its name, the 5600 should wipe the floor with the Ti4800, right? Not so fast, first we have to show you the specs and drop the annoying game show schtick.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600
• Bus Type AGP
• Memory 256MB DDR
• Core Clock 325MHz
• RAMDAC Dual 400MHz
• API Support DirectX, OpenGL for windows
• Connectors VGA, DVI, VIVO
• 81 million vertices/sec.
• AGP 8X (compatible with 4X AGP 2.0 compliant slots)
• 4 pixels per clock rendering engine
• Up to 16 textures per pass
• Intellisample Technology
• Video Mixing Renderer
• Digital Vibrance Control™ 3.0
• Vertex Shader 2.0+ and Pixel Shader 2.0+
• Geometry Displacement Mapping

• NVDVD 2.0 multimedia software
• Ulead VideoStudio 6 SE video editing software
• Full installation manual (.PDF) with troubleshooting guide
• GeForce FX demos
• VIVO cable

The unique feature of the card is its 256MB of memory. Will it make a difference in today's games?