SUMMARY: After listening to everyone dog the new line of GeForceFX GPU, it can be difficult for a manufacturer to come up with a workable solution while still using this chipset. Enter Prolink with their FX5600 "Golden Limited" video card. Come join Mike "Darthtanion" Wright as he takes a look at one of the latest offerings from the folks at Prolink and see if they have succeeded in creating a solid video board.
It has become commonplace anymore to open up the box of a new graphics board and see nothing but the card, a driver disk and maybe an installation manual. And while this method does have advantages (such as keeping costs down), it has also become boring.
Leave it to Prolink to reinvent the software package. Not only do you get the normal items you would expect to see, but you also get to wade through eight CD disks as well. What do you get?
Well, lets see...
You get the expected driver disk and also a couple of disks with some demos on them. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it does save you the time of downloading hundreds of megs of data yourself.
On top of that you get three game disks (Codename: Outbreak, Ballistics and Le Mans 24 Hours), WinDVD4 and PowerDirector 2.5. So all in all we have a pretty good package here.
Also you will receive the normal set of cabling that normally comes with a video board of any quality. But there are a couple of things that bear mention:
First off, you can begin your adoration about now. ATI has been known to add this little gem in their board packages and it is great to see one of the nVidia counterparts following suit. In case you haven’t seen one of these things before, it is an adaptor that allows you to hook up a second CRT monitor to your system. It does this by converting the DVI port to a standard CRT type, allowing you to hook up dual displays without the need of one of them needing to be a digital type.
The other thing that needs to be brought up is that the board we’re looking at handles both video in and video out. You may have heard of this before as VIVO, but it means that we need to have a way to get the signal into the card as well as standard output. This is handled by the above device. It allows for both standard video in as well as S-Video input, and of course, it also handles these same methods as an output source as well.
But enough of the extra goodies, lets get on with the video board itself!
