Gainward Ultra960

A fast card that will appeal to power users.

Price: £154.45

Manufacturer: Gainward

Ratings

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Verdict

Pros:

Very fast; overclocking software.

Cons:
Not a lot of software.

Verdict:
A great card that's faster than any other standard 5700 Ultra on the market. The overclocking utility will appeal to the power users out there.

David Ludlow, Personal Computer World 16 Mar 2004

You've got to give credit to companies like Gainward for making changes to Nvidia's reference boards and boosting performance. With the Ultra 960 card - based on the 128MB Nvidia Geforce FX 5700 Ultra - it has continued this trend.

Its Golden Sample tag means that installing the provided drivers automatically ups the GPU core speed from 475MHz to 500MHz, and the memory speed from 900MHz to 1GHz.

An overclocking utility means the card can be reverted to Nvidia's specifications or, if you have enough cooling, overclocked further.

In our tests, this returned a 3Dmark 2001 score of 15,300 running at 1,024 x 768. In our Unreal Tournament test, the card scored 82.84fps at 1,024 x 768 and even turning the resolution up to 1,600 x 1,200 and using four-times anti-aliasing still gave a playable frame rate of 38.94fps. Based on these tests, this is the fastest Geforce FX 5700 card that we have seen so far.

The performance hasn't come at the sacrifice of features; analogue, S-Video and DVI-I ports are standard and the single fan is fairly quiet. Gainward also provides an adaptor cable for the S-Video port and a power cable splitter.

Software is the only weak part of the package, and only WinDVD 4 was in our box.

Even so, this is a top card, and with the overclocking software this card will suit standard and power users alike.

Contact: Directfrom 0870 4000 111
www.directfrom.com

Specifications: