Judged on
its own merits, the GV-N595U is an excellent gaming card. On our test system
here at PCstats, and on a second, less powerful system (Athlon XP 3000+), the
Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra delivered a smooth gaming experience with maximum
graphics options enabled on Halo and Max Payne 2, among other recent games.
We experienced no stability issues
whatsoever, image quality was admirable and we have no hesitation recommending
the card purely on its ability to enhance your gaming.
As for
whether the Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra line of cards is worth the extra
cash when compared to the Radeon 9800 Pro, that's a different value judgment
entirely. The Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra does offer enhanced performance over the
Radeon 9800 Pro, especially with overclocking, but unfortunately in almost every
test where it exceeded the Radeon 9800 Pro, its FX5900 sibling did also.
This begs
the question of whether it is worth paying the premium for a slight performance
advantage. We will have to wait and see how the Radeon 9800XT performs in our
test lab before the balance between these few cards is completely clear.
Currently
the bias in the hardware community is towards ATI, what with the performance
advantage they have been enjoying over the last few months and the continuing
minor scandal over Nvidia's 3Dmark 2003 optimizations.On the other hand, I can say that my experience with
this Gigabyte/Nvidia product was completely positive, which means a fair bit
(well, to me at least).
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