PixelView GeForce 5900XT Golden Limited

Introduction

Since not everyone can afford a $500 videocard there is a huge market for mid-range cards. While ATI has its Radeon 9600XT NVIDIA has had a few different options, both the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and now the GeForce FX 5900XT. ProLink supplied me with their 5900XT card, the PixelView GeForce FX5900XT Golden Limited and today I am testing to see what 200$ are giving you.

Features and Specifications

As you can figure from the name this FX5900XT isn't your regular reference FX5900XT. But before we go into the things that make this card special, let us look at the specifications for the GeForce FX5900XT:

• 256 bit GPU
• 256 bit memory interface
• 128 MB memory, 2.8 ns
• NV35 core
• 390 MHz (Engine)/ 700 MHz (memory)
• Pixelshader 2.0 support
• 4x2 pipeline
• SVIDEO-Out, DVI, VGA

What we basically have is a lower clocked FX5950.

Let us take a look at what makes this card special:

PDFII
PDF stands for Plasma Display Fan and is a complete all-in-one thermal system complete with Aluminum Alloy housing, as well as VGA temperature and fan speed control and monitoring. The monitoring is done either through software or through the Large blue LCD display that you either can let sit on the card or put in a spare 5 1/4 slot. To lower noise the fan also switches between 3 different speeds. When the GPU is below 40 C it runs at 60% of full sped, between 40 and 60 C it runs at 80% speed and above 60C it runs at full speed.

The card with the aluminum housing.

The LCD display can be put in a frontplate that
fits into a 5 1/4" place.

The bundle

When I unpacked the card there were 2 things that struck me. First of all the card looked cool with it's aluminum housing as well as the little blue LCD display attached to it. The second thing was that the card was so light. Compared to other cards that usually have some copper heatsinks this card was light as a feather.

In addition to the card you get:

• transparent 5 1/4 ... for the LCD
• Cable to extend the LCD display further away from the card.
• Different video cables for both SVIDEO in and composite.
• Driver CD with the software Patrolman.
• PowerDVD 3.0

The bundle is adequate without having anything special in it.

I can't say that the bundle did impress me. All the cables are there which is a plus and the driver on the CD actually is one of the newer ones but PowerDVD 3.0? Considering that they ship WinDVD 5.0 with their Prolink PixelView PlayTV@7000 I am surprised they didn't do the same here.

Installation

My first plan was to install this card in my main machine and compare it to the scores from the PowerColor 9800SE review I did a while ago. I quickly ran into a problem though. The card didn't fit. It wasn't to long but it was to thick. The aluminum housing ended up right above one of the IDE connectors and there were nothing I could do to get it to fit (except cutting away some of the aluminum housing). My next step was to try it in my Shuttle SFF system. However I had a similar problem here - the aluminum housing got stuck in the drive bay above the card. In fact - I worked for over an hour to get it in and in the end I had to mutilate the housing a bit by removing the bit where the LCD was stuck on the card and then remove the whole aluminum housing, fit the card and put back the housing, to get it to fit.

I had to cut of the pieces that hold the
LCD display to get it to fit.

One funny thing is that Prolink actually has a small image of the card sitting in a Shuttle SFF system. After all my troubles I looked at the image a bit closer and guess what - the way the fitted the card is by completely removing the drive bays - no CD, no HD. What kind of system is that?

After the card was installed I tried to run some benchmarks but no games actually did work. THis is the type of graphics I got with all D3D games:

Ouch, not pretty.

While the temperatures were a bit higher than expected they still were inside the limits at around 50-60C. I was starting to suspect I had gotten a broken card. I then however decided to do some cutting in the aluminum housing to fit it into my main system. It sucks when you have to cut away pieces of the cooling system but luckily I didn't have to do that much damage to it, just a bit in the corner.

I made sure to cut as little possible
not to disturb the airflow to much.

Since I had cut away the holder for the LCD-display I had to use the cable to hook it up. It however turned out that the cable was to short to reach the frontpanel in my lowest 5 1/4" slot. I really think Prolink should make a 3 1/2" frontpanel instead or make a longer cable. For the purpose of this review I ended up having it hanging out of the case.

Both the LCD display as well as the fan glows blue in your case.

Drivers and the utility of course were easy to install. While the driver on the CD both were pretty up-to-date as well as already have coolbits installed I decided to use the latest reference drivers from NVIDIA for this review.

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