PCI Express Graphics card: Gigabyte GV-NX59128D

This PCI Express graphics card is based on nVidia's PCX 5900 GPU. It has 128 MB DDR memory, DVI-1, TV-Out and D-Sub connectors. We tested it on an Intel desktop board D925XCV with P4 3.6 GHz, 1 GB DDR II memory, and 7200 RPM Serial ATA hard drive. Since the PCI Express bus offers double the bandwidth of an AGP 8X bus, the performance of a card based on this bus is expected to be far better. This was verified when we reviewed a PCI Express graphics card, Asus Extreme AX 600XT, in September 2004 (page 144). We've compared this card with the Asus card. This card outperformed the Asus card in all the benchmarks we subjected it to. In Quake III Arena, it outperformed the Asus card by a 12% margin at a lower resolution and went up to 31% in the higher resolution. In 3Dmark 2003, it took a 16% lead. The results for Unreal Tournament, however, were a little strange. It outperformed the Asus card by 11% at a lower resolution, and gave a lower score at the higher resolution. The card comes with two games, Spell Force and RainbowSix3 Raven Shield, and some utilities such as Power DVD 5 and 3D-Album, which lets you create 3D animated albums with digital photos.

The Bottom Line: The card is more economical than the Asus600XT, and is also better on the performance front. 

Ankit Kawatra