Introduction

It is quite well known that the 3D battle for not only speed but market acceptance is now in full swing and with this we have the good news as well as bad news scenario for both the consumer and the manufacturer.

While just a year ago, the only card to choose was an nVidia powered card - ATI, S3 and 3DFX were just not up to the standards. Now ATI has come into its own, S3 is in partnership with VIA and quitting the high-end video cards and well, 3DFX is now owned by nVidia. Quite simply, at this time it is a choice of either Radeon or GeForce FX in the high-end graphics department.

Gigabyte has been one of my favourite up and comers in the hardware community, why? Simply put, they are diverse. Rather than put all their push onto the one product or chipset, Gigabyte give each a chance. If it doesn't perform, it doesn't make the final cut. This makes Gigabyte a much more diverse company then the likes of ASUS or ABIT who stick to the one make, rather than testing all of what is available.

Gigabyte's graphics segment has been more a one sided affair ever since the GeForce 3 did not perform as well as expected, and ATI were looking for partners. Since then Gigabyte has pushed its ATI Radeon based card, today Gigabyte is expanding into the nVidia market.

Seeing the original NV30 based core cards were more of a flop, it has taken the NV35 and NV38 cores from nVidia to convince Gigabyte to try nVidia again. Today they have taken the challenge nVidia has laid down to ATI with the GeForce FX 5950 GPU. Today in our first review for 2004 we take a look at Gigabyte's first nVidia card in over two years - Introducing the N595U from Gigabyte!

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