ABIT Suliro FX5900 - First Impressions

A PICTURE'S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

Before I discuss my first impressions of the card, I want you to develop some of your own. Here's some thumbnails to help orientate you with this graphics board.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The packaging was definitely pro all the way, but opening the box left me damn near in awe.  This thing was a monster!  I had flashbacks to when I first opened my 3dfx V5500 for the first time, which was a dual GPU beast, we're talking about an impressive looking card.  With the FX5900's dual slot design and massive OTES cooler strapped to the top of the not exactly small heat sink, this card was ready to be used as a weapon in a Murder One case.

After looking a little closer I noticed some of the small things that can make or break a card.  There was a heat sink on the back to handle to rear of the GPU and memory, which several manufacturers have been overlooking lately.  The heat sink appeared to be a well thought out design that provided good contact area to the spots that count, the memory and the GPU itself.  The inclusion of both CRT analog out, DVI, and S-Video showed me that they covered all of their bases.  Not that this is awe inspiring within itself, but it is an indication that ABIT didn't cut any corners when delivering what they surely hope to be a contender. 

What's becoming more and more common place on cards now-a-days is the additional power connector on the card.

This additional power connector is required for operation of the card and provides clean power to the GPU.  Simply put, as powerful as high end video cards have become it's just not possible to feed them with enough power thru the AGP slot and this additional connection is necessary. 

What do they mean, OTES?

ABIT has a unique cooling design that they have affectionately (ok, maybe not affectionately but when talking to an ABIT engineer it's clear that they love this thing!) named "OTES".

OTES stands for "Outside Thermal exhaust System" and that describes it pretty well.  What is basically is is a duct system that routes the cooling fans exhaust of hot air outside the case instead of leaving it in your case and raising the temperatures of all of your devices.  It utilizes a double PCI slot design and with the extra slot they've mounted an exhaust port that acts as an outlet for the hot air.  Here's a few close up images to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about.

As you can clearly see, this thing is no small cooling solution!  Here's a a few more pics to get the point across of how this is setup.

For a more in-depth definition of OTES and to read ABIT's full write up on the OTES you can click THIS LINK, but I think you get the idea.

Blue LED Fan

It's small things that make a difference in a product, and ABIT is known to pay attention to the small things.  One of them is the blue LED fan on the OTES cooling.

Do the lights in any way increase performance? Nope.  But they look cool.

nVIDIA DRIVERS

If you've used an nVidia chipset based video card since the TNT chipset, you're already familiar with the driver layout.  One unique thing about nVidia cards is that they use the same driver no matter which card you have.  NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) allows them to have a one stop shop driver solution for pretty much every one of their modern graphics cards.

Because so many of you are already familiar with the drivers I'm not going to waste your time with a bunch of screen shots.  I will touch on just a few things that I feel are important.

General Performance Options

As you can see above the options here are relatively simply.  The last year or so of Det drivers have brought the Image settings slider.  It allows choosing either "High Performance", "Performance", or "Quality".  These different selections actually make a difference.  A quick benchmark comparison between the three settings not only shows the score deteriorate as the quality is cranked up, but you can see a noticable difference in quality and delivery.

As far as Antialiasing the options are anywhere from off up to 8x AA.  For Antisotropic FIltering (I still struggle to SAY that word!) you have the same range, off to 8x.

Overclocking Tab

While this is not a standard tab, simply installing a tweak program like Coolbits or RivaTuner unlocks this tab to be displayed.  The thing that is an exciting addition to the FX series of cards from nVidia is that you can set different clock speeds for 2D and 3D applications.

This is stellar because the last time I checked, overclocking your video card doesn't give you any gained performance in launching a Microsoft Word document.  That said, why have your expensive video card running hot when you don't need it to?  This is a great addition and definitely welcome.

Alright, I've gone on long enough, it's time to see what this card can do.  All the niceties in the world are great, but how does it perform?  Let's head to page three and get these benchmarks underway!

Next: Benchmarking Begins >>
 

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