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- Date:
- Wednesday, February 18, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gigabyte R96X and NV57U Review
Step inside as we take a look at Gigabyte’s latest mainstream cards the R96X (9600XT) and N57U (5700U). We pit them head to head examining gameplay experience in eight games with some surprising results.
Games:
One of the things we really appreciate in a video card package is an impressive bundle. More then often manufacturers will stick a game or two in the bundle, but it is usually an older game or game of the last generation. What is starting though is a new trend, and a trend we like, the inclusion of current games. ATI started it by announcing the Half Life 2 bundle in their XT cards. Though the game isn’t out yet they put a coupon in there so you can mail it in and get this game for free. Recently NVIDIA has jumped in the game and is now offering Call of Duty free with the purchase of a GFFX 5900 series graphics card for a limited time.
Gigabyte is upping the stakes with manufacturers by including a three game bundle of current games.
Above is the game bundle from the N57U (left) and the R96X (right). As you can see both come with the same bundle and it includes the full version games of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, Will Rock and Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield.
There is one major caveat with the R96X. Though our box says HL2 is free with this card the fact is that Gigabyte has decided not to include HL2 free with the R96X video card bundle. Current retail boxes do not have this free HL2 label like our box does. There have been customers that have shared this fate as well. In our opinion, if they promised you the game on the box, then you should of course get what you were offered. It is yet to be seen what Gigabyte will be doing about this.
Software:
Both cards come with a driver CD, a book and PowerDVD 5.0. On the driver CD is a utility called V-Tuner.
When you install V-Tuner it sets up a resident program icon in your system tray. From here you can view system properties and quickly select resolution, color and refresh rate settings. The actual overclocking application is accessible from this tray icon. When you click on V-Tuner the application is launched. As you can see it is a very simple core and memory overclocking utility. We actually found this utility to be somewhat sluggish accessing the slider controls. It was as if the program would loose mouse focus easily. It was hard pinpointing exactly what clock speeds you wanted to set precisely. It does let you save and load profiles though. If you look at the help screen you will see there is even more to this program. The extra temperature and fan controls were not functional with either our 5700U or 9600XT card.
It was easier to just use coolbits to expose the overclocking tab in the NVIDIA drivers for the 5700U and use a third party app like powerstrip or Rage3D Tweak for the 9600XT.
Drivers:
The driver version contained on the CD with the N57U was 52.16. Therefore you can browse to NVIDIA’s site to obtain the latest version, as of this writing 53.03. The driver version on the CD for the R96X was Catalyst 3.9. As of our testing the latest driver was Catalyst 3.10 which we used in this review. As of our publishing though the latest driver is currently Catalyst 4.1 from ATI.
The default speed of the N57U at 2D is 300MHz core and 906MHz memory. When the card switches to 3D mode the core jumps up to 475MHz.
The default speed of the R96X at all times is 500MHz core and 600MHz memory.
Test Setup:
ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3GHz “C” and a Pentium 4 2.4GHz “C”, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b.
Gigabyte GV-N57U128D – Operating at default clock speeds 475/906 using Forceware 53.03 (WHQL).
Gigabyte GV-R96X128D – Operating at default clock speeds 500/600 using Catalyst Driver 3.10 (WHQL.)