NVIDIA's New Upper Class: The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

As the name implies, the GeForce FX 5950, or the NV38, is not a new design and is largely identical to the previous top-of-the-line model, the FX 5900 Ultra.

Like ATi's new Radeon 9600 XT, NVIDIA's new cards benefit from the Taiwanese foundry TSMC's new 130-nm production process. However, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra only offers a processor clock speed increase of 25MHz to 475MHz. The memory is also clocked 50MHz faster to 475MHz, increasing the memory bandwidth from 27.2 GB/s (FX 5900U) to 30.4 GB/s (FX 5950U). The new cards also come equipped with 256MB of RAM on a 256Bit memory bus.

Full frontal. Visually, the card is dominated by its very large heatsink. A design decision that is, as always, a matter of taste.

The back of the card also features passive cooling for the GPU and the memory chips.