![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, June 25, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gainward GeForceFX 5900
A GeForceFX that's thin, quiet AND fast? We show you the Gainward card that fills the middle slot (and only one slot) of the GFFX line up.
EXPERTool
On the Gainward Power CD there are several utilities included that give you even more control over this video card. EXPERTool is a display control and desktop enhancement utility for your Gainward video card. When installed you will get an icon in the system tray that you can right-click on and select different options from.
The first option you can choose from is the Desktop menu in EXPERTool. The desktop options are similar to “Display Properties” in Windows but more easily accessible from a one page menu. You can select your Resolution, Color Setting, Font Size, and Refresh Rate here for your 2D desktop. The color menu lets you change the Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast of your monitor. If you change something and are not happy with the outcome, you can click on the default button to reset back to defaults.
The information menu gives you detailed information about the operating environment of your Gainward card. By scrolling down on this menu, you will also get details about your Windows environment. By clicking the EXPERT Update button on this menu, you will have the option to connect to the Internet for updates concerning your Gainward card. Currently the latest version of EXPERTool is 3.08, which is what we have installed here. The monitor menu lets you change the position of your Windows desktop. You can also change the power saving options and read detailed information on your monitor setup.
The Performance menu will be of the most interest to those that wish to overclock. When you use the CD to install the drivers for this video card, you are presented with two options. You can install the drivers in “Enhanced Mode” or “Safe Mode”. Safe Mode sets the card at the stock NVIDIA reference clock speed values for this graphics core. Enhanced Mode ‘overclocks’ this card to a higher value to allow for more performance while gaming. This Enhanced Mode can be done thanks to the “Golden Sample” nature of this video card. Basically Gainward is saying these are values they can guarantee you can overclock to for greater performance and that they will throw in the option to do it easily.
In the first picture you will see the card in Safe Mode settings. It runs at 400MHz for the core and 850MHz (DDR) for the memory. In the second picture Enhanced Mode is selected, and as you can see the card will now run at 440MHz core and 900MHz (DDR) memory speed. You can exceed these built in modes by changing the sliders individually. In the last picture above, we show you the maximum values the sliders will allow which is 500/1050MHz. While that provides plenty of room for memory overclocking attempts, it does not allow higher than 500MHz for the core.
Do note that Gainward will not warrant this card beyond the built in “Enhanced Mode”.
EXPERTBIOS is a Gainward unique Windows-based software utility that allows easy BIOS flashing for all of their cards. In this program you can save your BIOS out to a file to back up, as I have done above. If a new BIOS is released it will be up on Gainward's website so that you can download it and then update it with this easy to use flash utility.
Drivers:
The driver version we used for testing are the latest 44.03 drivers from NVIDIA’s website. As you can see above, these drivers are WHQL. The default quality settings of the card are shown above as well. Also above is the idle temperature of the video card in 2D.
Confirming the clock speed settings with coolbits, we do find that in Safe Mode the 3D clock speeds are 400/850MHz and in 2D they are 300/850MHz.
In Enhanced Mode the 3D clocks are 440/900MHz and in 2D they are 300/900MHz.
Overclocking:
Our first attempts at overclocking were done using the Auto Detect option.
As you can see, each time we pressed Auto Detect we did get slightly different results, but for the most part they were close. Even though this was true, we still went on and overclocked manually to see what the max overclock we could get was and if it matched what the Auto detect got.
After many overclocking attempts in some very intense gaming, we found that it nailed the memory overclock. We were able to overclock it to a stable 950MHz. This is pretty much what the Auto detect told us. The core did slightly better than the Auto detect showed us, though. We were able to get a stable 480MHz core speed. I was really hopping the core would at least get to 500MHz, but it just wasn’t going to happen. When this card is overclocked too high it doesn’t give artifacts or lock ups, what it does is give very long pauses. You will be playing a game in UT2K3 for example and all of a sudden the game will just stop, maybe for 10 seconds, maybe for 20, and then it will continue again. These pauses only occur when you raise the core speed too high, and they do affect the benchmark scores. So the highest core speed we were able to achieve is 480MHz. At this speed there were no pauses in games and it was definitely stable.
As you can see, the NVIDIA driver coolbits option gives us a bit more room to play with in terms of overclocking, allowing up to 600MHz on the core slider and 2GHz on the memory slider.
So, to sum up all of the clock speed data:
Safe Mode 3D - 400/850 MHz
Enhanced Mode 3D - 440/900 MHz
Overclocked Speed 3D – 480/950 MHz