![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , July 15, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
BFG Technologies 5900 Ultra Review
Our first retail 5900-Ultra has arrived, and is being provided by BFGTech. We examine this video card and hopefully help you make an informed buying decision when it comes to NVIDIA’s latest and greatest.
Drivers:
When you insert your BFG Asylum CD into your CD-ROM drive a menu pops up from which you can select various things to install. If you click on Install Drivers the 44.03 drivers are installed for you. You can choose to view the Install Manual which requires Adobe Acrobat Reader. DirectX 9 is also included in-case you do not have it. This CD also comes with a full commercial version of nvDVD player software. There are also four demos included to show off the power of your video card. Dawn and Ogre which require the GeForceFX video card and Wolfman and Squid which require at least a GeForce4. Lastly there is a selection to install Windowblinds to enable the BFG/Asylum and NVIDIA skins for your desktop.
The first picture above shows you the BFG Wallpaper that is included with the themes. The second picture shows you what the BFG Theme looks like. The third picture shows you the BFG Asylum theme which is darker and more sinister than the previous. And lastly there is also an NVIDIA theme. I think the inclusion of these themes really is nice addition. Even if you are not taken with their themes, this can certainly be an introduction into Windows themes that some of you do not know exist.
Above are pictures from the 44.03 driver control panel installed on our BFG 5900 Ultra video card. As you can see the default setting for Image Settings is still Quality, as it very well should be. The 2D clock speeds are 300/850MHz and the 3D clock speeds are 450/850MHz.
Overclocking:
For our overclocking attempts we first tried the Auto Detect option in our driver (unlocked with the CoolBits Registry modifier) to see what the highest stable overclock was that it would operate at. After clicking the button several times and letting it detect the highest overclock we stopped it at the highest setting that it detected. That was 485 MHz on the core and 922 MHz memory. We ran numerous stressing tests and determined that this was definitely a stable operating frequency.
However, we of course had to manually push it higher to see how high we could REALLY get it! By first moving the core selector solo we were able to get a stable 540 MHz out of the core! Then we set the core back to default and overclocked the memory solo, doing this we got a stable 930 MHz, not much over what the Auto Detect option selected.
Then the real test began, to see how high we could get both the core and memory at the same time. On these cards since they draw so much power by default when you raise something like the core and memory together it does put even more of a strain on power. That is why typically you will not be able to get both the core and memory up to the highest speed that you might have overclocking each one separately. There just isn’t enough voltage for it.
It took us hours to find a combination that was 100% stable yet still a good healthy overclock on both the core and memory. That setting was 500 MHz core and 925 MHz memory. That is a healthy 50 MHz overclock for the core and a 37.5 MHz overclock for the memory which brings us to a total of 29.6GB/sec of raw memory bandwidth.
Test Setup:
ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3GHz “C” operating at 800MHz FSB, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0a.
BFG Asylum 5900 Ultra 256MB - Operating at 450/850, and 500/925 using driver version 44.03.
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB – Operating at default speeds (380/700MHz) using driver version Catalyst 3.5.