22-Aug-2003 It's priced to match the 9800 Pro. But can it beat the ATI kingpin? No doubt about it, the MSI card is a work of art - a wide tablet of copper, fashioned into elegant ridges and swirls, sandwiches the board on both sides. And like the 3D Blaster 5 reviewed below, it's unnaturally quiet - your PSU and hard drive are likely to be more vociferous.
Unlike the 256Mb Ultra, the vanilla version is set at a 400MHz core frequency and has 128Mb of DDR memory. Non-Ultra models normally use an 800MHz memory frequency (ie 400MHz DDR) rather than the 850MHz here - I guess this is MSI playing with the throttle, because as the performance chart shows, the card is more than capable of taking the heat. Clocked up, it can be made to match the impressive performance of the Ultra in some benchmarks.
Conclusion Standard or tweaked, the 5900 performs brilliantly at everyday resolutions. By that I mean if you use it to run the games you play now at 1024x768, the results are smoother than glass. In action games, high-polygon areas that would cause a lesser graphics engine to stall are dismissed with ease. The downside is that, when you crank up the quality and pixel count, it becomes somewhat asthmatic next to its Ultra relative or 9800 Pro. It's then that you have to ask, with the Radeon the same price and getting cheaper by the hour, why would you want this GeForce? If MSI stripped their card of its monolithic box, lost the 10 games, 20 utilities and Adobe Photoshop, and dropped the price by 50, it'd be a best buy winner.
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