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With the bitter war between ATI and Nvidia raging on, Gigabyte clearly has no wish whatsoever to take sides. Instead, the company offers a wide range of both Radeon and Geforce-based cards.
The model Gigabyte submitted for this group test isn't its 9800 XT, but instead the snappily titled GV-N595U256V. It's not the most catchy of names, but if you look closely you'll see that it basically means it has an Nvidia Geforce FX 5950 Ultra with 256MB of Ram - the same amount of memory as all the other cards featured here.
Gigabyte has made a sterling effort with the software that's bundled with this card. In terms of utilities you get PowerDVD from Cyberlink, as well as the colourful Gigabyte V-Tuner tool. V-Tuner gives you the power to adjust the speed of the fan and those all-important memory and core clock speeds with ease. What's interesting for speed freaks is that if you use the V-Tuner utility to overclock the card, the warranty will still be valid. Take a look at the MSI offering, for example, and you'll find that if you use MSI Clock and it damages the card, your warranty will be voided.
The games bundle is also pretty decent and includes three titles. The official website says that you get Arx Fatalis, Tomb Raider and Raven Shield, however our review sample hadWill Rock instead of Arx Fatalis. As this is an Nvidia card, you don't get ATI's Half- Life 2 voucher.
Considering what's bundled with the card, Gigabyte has done well to price the GV-N595U256V at just a little over £300, and it's certainly a fair bit cheaper than some of the other models. If you think you'd prefer an Nvidia Geforce FX 5950 Ultra card over a Radeon 9800 XT, then this Gigabyte offering is well worth considering.
Contact: Gigabyte 08704 293 010 (Dabs.com - sales)
www.giga-byte.com
See also:
This graphics card comes with lots of extras but are they of any use? 30 Jul 2004
All Graphics Cards
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