Introduction

If you fast-forward back to March 2003, you’ll recall that both ATI and NVIDIA had a number of announcements to share with the public. Chief among these was news of their latest notebook graphics products. In the case of ATI, they were busy launching their MOBILITY RADEON 9600 family. NVIDIA countered with notebook graphics products of their own, the GeForce FX Go5200 and Go5600. These products were largely based on the respective manufacturer’s desktop graphics products, marking the first time DX9 graphics were announced for the mobile market.

Whenever a next-generation part makes its way to a new segment of consumers, it’s only natural that the announcement will generate a lot of buzz among the press; we were guilty of covering the launch as well. However, NVIDIA made one other important announcement around that same timeframe: NVIDIA was granted exclusive distribution rights to EA’s current and upcoming titles.

As the world’s largest games publisher, the EA deal gave NVIDIA and its board partners access to an extensive library of games. We’re not talking third-rate video games here either; EA has some pretty established brands. EA Sports alone has big names like Madden football, Tiger Woods golf, and NBA Live. EA Games boasts titles like SimCity, The Sims, Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, and Need for Speed.

When one of the most important differentiating factors for video card manufacturers is the game bundle that ships with their products, it goes without saying that this announcement was a pretty big deal. MSI, the world’s largest video card manufacturer (based on a study conducted by Goldman Sachs) and one of NVIDIA’s Tier One board partners, is the first third-party graphics card manufacturer to take advantage of the EA/NVIDIA deal, in the form of the product we’re reviewing today, the NBox N5900 Ultra. This card ships with Battlefield 1942, Command and Conquer: Generals, and Unreal 2: The Awakening!

The hardware

Based on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU, the N5900 Ultra is not another GeForce FX 5900 Ultra reference board like the MSI FX5900U-VTD256 we reviewed last month. As it’s targeted at the enthusiast gamer, MSI has elected to equip the N5900 Ultra with an extreme cooling setup as well.

GeForce FX 5900 Ultra evolved

Like the GeForce FX 5900-based FX5900-TD128, the N5900 Ultra sports dual fans, one located in the traditional location above the graphics core, while the second fan is placed on the underside of the card, directly beneath the NV35 graphics core.

But it doesn’t stop there; MSI also includes a USB mouse in the package. This isn’t any ordinary mouse either; it’s an optical mouse with a blue LED!