Conclusion

While we normally like to declare a winner in our shootout comparison articles, it’s just too difficult to pick one this time. All of the cards we’ve presented today are designed to appeal in different ways, with the ultimate winner depending on your tastes and preferences.

Chaintech’s SA5900X has been designed to appeal to the consumer who wants all-out cooling. The board sports a cooler with a copper core, while its fan operates at the same (higher) RPMs at all times, regardless of which mode the board is currently operating in. This is great if you’re a hardcore gamer, especially if you’re overclocking, you always know that regardless of the situation, your card’s fan is working overtime to keep its NV35 graphics core cool. But what if you spend most of your time at the desktop browsing webpages? In this case, you may want something a little quieter.

MSI’s GeForce FX 5900 XT card, the FX5900XT-VTD128, is the exact opposite. It’s T.O.P. Tech Cooler was the quietest solution in this roundup, and was drowned out by the sound of our Thermaltake Silent Boost K8, which is one of the quieter Athlon 64 coolers on the market. It operates at the same low level of RPMs (we’d estimate somewhere between 2,000-3,000 RPMs) regardless of mode, making it perfect for those of you who want to build a near silent PC. It also boasts video input for those of you who would like to make your own home movies. This feature in particular is extremely hard to find among GeForce FX 5900 XT cards. Its only real weakness is the lack of built-in hardware monitoring.

The Leadtek board presents an interesting contrast in the sense that it does boast hardware monitoring functionality, as well as its WinFox hardware monitoring/overclocking tool, but the card lacks the exotic copper coolers present on the cards from Chaintech and Gigabyte. In operation, we did find that their Air Surround cooling solution ran quieter than the eVGA and Chaintech coolers, and largely mirrored the performance of the Chaintech cooler at stock speeds. In addition, the 2.2ns memory modules our board shipped with allowed us to overclock the board’s memory to unprecedented levels for a GeForce FX 5900 XT card. If this is important to you, you may want to check with your preferred retailer to see if their Leadtek boards use the same Hynix modules (it would certainly explain the higher price these boards tend to go for) our card shipped with. It’s also possible that Leadtek ran a batch of boards with 2.2ns memory modules because it was all they had on hand at the time.

Gigabyte’s cooler is copper-based for better heat transfer, and quieter than the eVGA and Chaintech cards, making it a worthy competitor as well. Gigabyte also has one of the better software bundles (although admittedly, this is subjective). Their V-Tuner software can also be used to overclock your graphics card, but unfortunately the board doesn’t offer hardware monitoring capabilities.

eVGA’s e-GeForce FX 5900 SE is one of the least expensive GeForce FX 5900 XT graphics cards on the market, and is a good all-round performer. It doesn’t offer some of the dazzling features of the other boards like copper cooling or hardware monitoring, but it is easy to find and was incredibly popular when it first came out thanks to the Call of Duty bundle all cards shipped with. As a first generation board design it has since faded away from the limelight a little, but it’s still a solid card that’s worthy of consideration.

In any case, NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 XT core has been popular since its inception due to its attractive pricing and good performance in today’s titles. NVIDIA has certainly delivered a card that has given the mainstream market what it wanted, a graphics solution that offers all the features of the flagship cards and much of the performance, but at a price point that is much more attractive to the wallet. The GeForce FX 5900 XT is one of the best bargains on the graphics market right now, and is truly a worthy successor to GeForce4 Ti 4200.