Q1 2004 Vendor Graphics Card Roundup

Gainward Cards

Gainward is the maker of the famous Golden Sample factory overclocked cards, and we wouldn't want to disappoint anyone by leaving them out. We've included a Golden Sample and a 5700 Ultra.

Gainward GeForce FX 5950 Golden Sample

The Golden Sample comes pre-clocked to 500/1000 (core/mem) and sports two red fan LEDs. The card will fit in a single slot, but we would still recommend leaving the first slot open to give the fans room to breathe.

This card was a bit of an enigma to us. We ended up getting two separate samples from Gainward. We sent the first back because we couldn't get through a couple runs of the Aquamark benchmark at 500/1000 clock speeds.

We determined that the problem had to be memory related, since we couldn't even run the card at 425/1000 error-free.

The second card we received had similar issues, though they were not as pronounced. We are still trying to track down exactly what is going on here. Since Gainward does have a 3-year warranty on their cards for running at their stock 500/1000 speeds, we decided to run the card at whatever core speed that we could get with a memory speed of 1000.

Gainward GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

This Gainward offering performed very well for the 5700 Ultra offerings, and hit some amazing memory clock speeds.