Computex 2003 - nVidia NV36 FX5700 Reference Videocard

Walking by the seven story high poster of "Dawn," the 'sexed-up' spokes-pixie for nVidia every day at the arrival to Computex 2003 sets the tone for what has undoubtedly continued to be an unabrashed battle against between nVidia and arch rival ATI.

As it stands, ATI has the better mainstream graphics card solution, and there are rumors floating around that it may even be working on new GPUs to compete in the high-end workstation segment. Nvidia on the other hand, has a larger profile to support its products, and perhaps more resolve to snatch the 'best graphics card' title away from ATI.

On a side note, I'd be curious to know what the Taipei NewYork NewYork is going to do with the 3/4-naked nVidia mascot once Computex 2003 has finished. How much do you think that piece of memorabilia would go for on Ebay to some nVidia fan? ;)

Before we get too off topic, let's return to the whole point of this report from Taipei, Taiwan; a little model number called "NV36."

During PCstats' tour of the trade show floor at Computex 2003 we gravitated towards the best and biggest graphics card companies, along with 63,000 other buyers and attendees.

Amongst the masses of nVidia Geforce FX5900's that everyone seemed to have on display there were a few closed door displays of nVidia's next core, NV36.

According to one unnamed marketing rep, the NV36 core weighs in at about 5000 3DMark03's. The card should be making its way into the market in a month or so, hopefully before Comdex 2003 in November.

While several companies took the time to show us their working NV36-A1 "P190" reference videocards, none that we saw were anything other than units provided by Nvidia themselves.

Prolink had their own pixie on hand to promote their FX5900 Pixelview videocard. As of yet, Prolink have not announced any FX5700 cards of their own.

Albatron plan to release their NV36 in two flavours, the FX5700PV and FX5700UV which will have a 450MHz core and 500MHz memory clock. The upcoming Albatron FX5700UV will pack in 128MB of DDR-2 memory, comply with AGP8X, support DX9.0+ and CineFX 2.0 engine along with OpenGL 1.4.

Memory speeds are expected to be as low as 3.9ns from the outset, and while we are a little unsure of the accuracy of this last point, cards may support up to 1GB or DDR-2.

Albatron will be staying true to their FX5900 Ultra videocard which used the Wisefan system, a use a improved version termed the Wisefan II on the FX5700 series. The main difference is that the third fan (there are three fans on the heatsink, two are used and one is for backup) will now kick in when the core temperature exceeds 45 degrees Celsius.

Chaintech on the other hand, have let PCstats know that they expect to ship their NV36 running at 475MHz core and 475MHz memory. The Chaintech FX5700 will also come with 128MB of DDR-2 memory on board, and it seems work has already begun on the cooling solution which is reported to keep noise levels of the Zenith-branded Videocard below 30dBA.

Other manufacturers may choose similar core and clock speeds, but actual figures have yet to be quoted. Without further adieu, here's Nvidia's next card - the Geforce FX5700 'NV36'...