I am about to buy a new video card, and I have a question...

The Nvidia GeForce FX5900xt Looked the best for me (preformance, and pricewise), but, I was just doing some last-minute research, and the FX5700ultra has a higher clock-speed by about 200mhz, and the same ammount of memory, and it costs less.

SO, what's the deal here? which card is better? I was originally thinking that the 5900 would be the better choice because of the higher model-number, but am I wrong?

-The Bumstedman

You're right, the 5700 Ultra has a 75MHz core advantage and an effective 200MHz RAM speed advantage. However, the 5900 XT's core has an extra texture unit (more performance) and its RAM bandwidth is 256-bit (vs the 5700 Ultra's 128-bit). So, the 5900 XT actually has 22.4GBps RAM bandwidth, while the 5700 Ultra has only 14.4GBps.

Speed alone is not a very reliable indication of performance. Just as a Celeron is slower than a Pentium 4 of the same speed, the 5700 Ultra has less bang per clock cycle than the 5900 XT.

Yes, very true. Thanks for the Help, I just purchased the FX5900xt from newegg. Question: will my 250watt Power supply be enough to power it?


-The Bumstedman

Never Mind about the Power Supply. I just asked some guiys at dell, and apparently the listed wattage in the manual is not the peak production, it is the average ammount produced. Meaning that I have a 360 watt power supply, which is plenty.

-The Bumstedman