Introduction

The battle for 3D supremacy has become something of a hot issue. There are two sides to the preverbal coin. On one side we have ATI with its R3xx core design. In our opinion it is designed like AMD Athlon CPU's - Speed isn't the issue but how much it can push along its short, fat pipeline. While this shorter pipeline might be seen as a bad thing, remember, AMD Athlon XP managed to kick some Intel Pentium 4 behind from time to time.

On the other side of the coin we have nVidia with its NV3x cores. These are designed like the Pentium 4 with longer pipelines and faster core speeds. While this may also seem to be a winner, it is still matched by its ATI competition.

While the top of the line battle has been in the spotlight for some time, it is the more value orientated market that is starting to heat up. While there are the individuals out there who will put out serious dollars for a graphics card, you will find more people going for cheaper mid-range cards and this is where several new value cores have made it into the market.

The 5700 series core was designed to be the ultimate mid-range for nVidia, but with performance not reaching the barriers that nVidia had hoped, a new strategy had to be formed.

With little use now for the 5900 series, nVidia had an idea - lower the core clock to allow for a smaller, quieter cooling solution and reduce the memory size. This new version has been named the GeForce FX 5900 XT. Today we check out the new GPU in the form of the FX5900XTV graphics card from Albatron.

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