During Computex 2003 I attended the NVIDIA conference where Gigabyte had a number of GeForce based product boxes on display. At the time Gigabyte were still offering ATi based solutions, however it was now evident that they would be making the switch to NVIDIA. This switch occurred around the same time that ASUS turned from NVIDIA to ATi. This has been an interesting turn of events that will now see ASUS based graphics solutions use ATi chips where as Gigabyte will use NVIDIA chips. Over the past several months Gigabyte has had great success with their nForce2 based products from NVIDIA. With nForce3 products on the way, Gigabyte moved their graphics card line over to NVIDIA to strengthen the relationship between the two companies. Gigabyte is one of the worlds largest motherboard manufacturers and for quite some time now the company has been expanding its product lines beyond motherboards. Although graphics cards have been on Gigabyte's agenda for quite some time, I feel they really only started to push this side of their business around the launch of the ATi Radeon 9700. Today, the company is putting a lot of effort into their mobile computing and optical storage products. With the move to NVIDIA it is obvious that Gigabyte sees great potential in the company. While NVIDIA may be the biggest manufacturer in their industry, ATi have been performing better over the past several months. So, it will be interesting to see how successful the move to NVIDIA will be for Gigabyte over the next few months.

Already Gigabyte offer a total of nine NVIDIA based graphics products, ranging from GeForce4 MX cards through to the latest and greatest GeForceFX cards. This of course includes the newly released GeForceFX 5950 Ultra and GeForceFX 5700 Ultra GPUs. Today I will be reviewing Gigabytes flagship graphics card being the N59U256V, which is based on the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra GPU. So what is the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra? In short, its an overclocked, beefed up, GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, receiving nothing more than a bigger cooling solution and a higher memory and core clock.

The GeForceFX 5950 Ultra now utilizes a 475MHz core frequency, which is exactly 25MHz faster than its predecessor, the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. Similar frequency alterations have been made to the memory, boosting it from the 425MHz (850MHz DDR) speed of the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra, to 475MHz (950MHz DDR) for the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra. These high numbers give the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra an impressive memory bandwidth of 30GB/s, which is almost 3GB/s more than the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. Apart from these minor frequency increases the GeForceFX 5950 Ultra also received a better cooling setup, though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the design. The card draws air in through the rear of the case and into your case. This means hot dusty air is being delivered directly into your case. Honestly, I dont feel this is all that bad, as a typical graphics card cooling setup does the same thing but with already hot air from inside the case.

So to reiterate what I just said, the GeForceFX 5950Ultra has received a core MHz increase, a memory frequency increase, and a redesigned thermal solution when compared to the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. Now it's time to see how Gigabytes version of the GeForceFX 5950Ultra performs, and whether these cards are worthy of all the hype they have been receiving?