Video Card: ASUS V9950 5900 Ultra Review :: The Card

The V9950 is based off NVIDIA's latest NV35 design and features 256MB of fast DDR memory, the ability to use Analog or Digital monitors, dual monitor support (Dual Analog or One Analog/One Digital) and VIVO (Video In-Video out) capabilities. Having a lot of fast memory helps make large frame rates possible and creates the ability to play the latest games at high resolutions. A good card should be able to play any game with all the bells and whistles enabled without choking even at higher resolutions such as 1280X1024@75Hz. The card features a 450MHz engine clock, 400MHz RAMDAC and an 850MHz memory clock with a maximum screen resolution of 2048X1536@85Hz. The card can work in any AGP board that supports the 2 X-8 X AGP standards.

One thing you will notice right off is the really interesting and cool looking heat sink and fan combination that is gold and offsets the cards blue color in a visually appealing way, which is a key element in a tricked out rig. This heatsink encompasses all the memory and GPU, which should allow the card to run at a very moderate temperature as well, permitting more room for overclocking without significant overheating problems arising. This cooling combination is also very quiet and offers the user a good start to a semi silent PC. The card requires the use of one of your power connectors from your power supply to run the fan and without it the card will not let the PC boot to avoid burning up the GPU. The design of the ASUS card is far superior to NVIDIA's reference board offering better cooling and taking up less room in your case.

The ability to utilize two monitors can benefit both the gamer and artist allowing multiple screens to be viewed simultaneously. This is a very cool thing depending on the application as many games now take advantage of this option and expand your overall viewing area. The ability to hook up two digital monitors instead of the one analog/one digital connection would have been an added plus to me as I use digital flat panel monitors solely as staring at a CRT all day gives me a massive headache a thing virtually eliminated just by switching monitor types. The VIVO in/out is done through a single port on the rear I/O and gets many confused who otherwise think the VIVO connections must be separated by individual in/out ports to be functional which in this instance is not applicable. This is the basic makeup of the card without going overboard on specifications, for in-depth technical specs you can go here. Performance is where the real test remains and we put the card through a battery of performance benchmarks to get the bottom line of where the V9950 stands, read on and see how this card fared.

CineFX 2.0 Engine

The second-generation CineFX 2.0 engine powers advanced pixel and vertex shader processing and true 128-bit color precision. Delivering double the floating-point pixel shader power of the previous CIneFX engine, CineFX 2.0 produces a visible performance boost through its more efficient execution of pixel shader programs.Intellisample HCTSecond-generation Intellisample technology delivers up to a 50-percent increase in compression efficiency for compressing color, texture, and z-data, and powers unprecedented visual quality for resolutions up to 1600 x 1280.UltraShadow TechnologyPowers the next-generation of complex, realistic shadow effects by accelerating shadow generation. Accurate shadows that effectively mimic reality without bogging down frame rates are one of the keys to more believable game environments.