SUMMARY: Today we have something special for visual fans. We have collected six of the fastest, latest and greatest graphics cards currently on the market from nVidia and ATI including GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, 6800 Ultra AGP and PCI Express, Radeon 9800XT and the AGP versions of the X800PRO and X800XT PE. We cover each card briefly and then compare them all in our usual array of benchmarks. The BIG BOYS have come out to play!
The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra would have been the first decent GPU to come out of the FX line of graphics cards from nVidia. The particular model we are looking at here is from BFG Technologies but as you can see for yourself, it pretty much follows the reference design which will help create a more apples-to-apples comparison later on. The GPU’s before the FX 5950 weren’t the best and can be explained as a bit of a flop. The 5950 was where the performance began to improve and then cards like the 5700 Ultra followed and started giving ATI a bit of a run for their money up till this very day.
As you might be able to see, the particular 5950 Ultra we are looking at here today follows the reference design as you may have noticed in the pictures. This graphics card is in the same class as the ATI Radeon 9800XT.
- (Reference) 6800 Ultra AGP
The 6800 Ultra is nVidia’s latest bad boy to hit the market and is designed to give the latest line of ATI graphics cards a really good run for their money. We have two versions of the card but the first one we will look at is the AGP version.
This graphics card comes direct from the folks at nVidia which means you cannot get any more reference than this. You can see the standard cooler which is quite thick and does take up a PCI slot.
- (Reference) 6800 Ultra PCI Express
The PCI Express version of the 6800 Ultra is identical in just about every way; the main difference is the slots interconnect as you can see in the picture below. PCI Express is the next generation of graphics interface and gives double the bandwidth of AGP 8X. While at the moment it is a new technology we are sure that we will see it take off further in the future. Apart from the slot change, the only other difference is the power connector on the rear of the card. A little adapter was provided with the card which splits it into two normal Molex connectors.
Before we see how PCI Express compares to AGP and the other cards here let’s have a quick look at the offerings from ATI.
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