eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900SE

As one of NVIDIA’s closest board partners, eVGA was one of the first manufacturers to release a GeForce FX 5900 XT card, the e-GeForce FX 5900 SE. In fact, we’ve heard many of NVIDIA’s board partners refer to eVGA as one of three companies that in many ways act as the retail front for NVIDIA themselves. With many of eVGA’s products being produced directly by NVIDIA (via Flextronics) this statement is certainly somewhat accurate, and in some ways could be considered a compliment.

eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900SE

Back of eVGAs card

Board analysis

If you recall the look of eVGA’s GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, you might at first mistake the e-GeForce FX 5900 SE for one of those boards. eVGA follows NVIDIA’s reference 5900 XT design to the letter and to further reduce costs, borrows the cooler from the 5600 Ultra and places it on the NV35 graphics core.

The cooler itself is composed entirely of aluminum. A ducted design has been implemented that draws the air from within your case and blows it across the heatsink and its fins before the air escapes out the top and right sides of the cooling duct. And while the fan on the e-GeForce FX 5900 SE is the same one used on their e-GeForce FX 5600 Ultra card, its pitch isn’t quite as high. It’s still one of the louder cards in this roundup, second only to the Chaintech SA5900X, but again, the fan isn’t unbearably loud. It’s located further offset of the graphics core than the other ducted designs, giving it more room to work its magic.

eVGA uses the exact same components for power circuitry as the other 5900 XT boards (including the same manufacturers), although they’ve implemented Silicon Image’s newer and smaller Sil 1162 DVI transmitter, freeing up a little more space on the board.

Like the Chaintech card, large aluminum heatsinks are used to keep the memory on the e-GeForce FX 5900 SE cool. Modules from Samsung’s Semiconductor division are used in addition to thermal pads, which sit between the top of the memory modules and the bottom of the heatsink. Thermal pads are designed to transfer heat from the memory’s surface to the underside of the heatsink, although some have argued that some actually act as inhibitors, preventing heat transfer.

The 5900SE is compared to eVGA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra

This card also has RAMsinks for added cooling

Whatever the case, keep in mind that the board’s memory modules are designed to operate at their default clock speed of 700MHz without a heatsink, so eVGA has implemented them at added cost to the company, and the DDR memory modules themselves do not get hot like DDR2 modules have proven to do. Both of NVIDIA’s DDR2 designs (GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and GeForce FX 5800 Ultra) truly needed their heatsinks, as did ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB, which also utilized DDR2 modules.

Hardware and software accessories

eVGA packages the e-GeForce FX 5900 SE with DVI and S-Video adapters as well as an S-Video cable, a power adapter wasn’t included with our review board. eVGA also ships the board with their Automated Driver Management software, which checks to ensure that you have the drivers for your motherboard and GART driver installed, as well as NVDVD 2.0, WindowBlinds, a demo copy of Earth Viewer, NVIDIA’s 3D technology demos, America’s Army, and finally, Ghost Recon. At one point eVGA also offered their e-GeForce FX 5900 SE boards with a free copy of Call of Duty (a $50 value), but as far as we can tell, all of these boards have sold out.