I've got a Leadtek WinFast a360 Ultra TDH, which esentially is the FX5700 U, it just ships with higher speeds. Stock speeds for this card are 475/950 vs. the stock speeds of regular 5700Us of 450/900. I've been able to get 530/1.07 just fine, but notice SOME (not a lot) artifacts. So I'm only running it at 520/1.05 now.
Only downside to this card is it uses GDDR3 (now that isn't a downside itself, here's why: ) and mose FX5700s use GDDR2. With the GDDR3 5700s, there are half the amount of chips, so there arn't any chips on the backside of the card. Now you may be thinking "So? Does this really make a differance in operation?". Well yes, if you want to use a big cooler like the NV Silencer 2, you have to mod it in one corner to secure it down enough so it will rest evenly on the core.
Stock cooling on this Leadtek card is uber leet, just not when overclocking. I burned the back of my finger when checking the RAMsinks last night after running four or five farb-rausch 3D intense videos; but the NV Silencer 2 REALLY helps out there, and the RAM barely gets warm now.
So over all, I love my FX5700U. I was shopping for a new video card one night which would fit my budget of $150, an I would not go with ATI (I'm an nVidia fanboy
). Shard helpped me pick it out, and told me it was the best nVidia card I could get in my price range. I totally agree with him, and I haven't had any problems wiht it so far. I can play Doom 3 with high settinsg and 1024x768 too.
Here are my 3Dmark scores:
NOT OVERCLOCKED OVERCLOCKED
3DMark2001 SE - 12900 13141
3DMark2003 Free - 3757 4221
3DMark2000 Free - 13105 13783
I don't know if they're the best, but I like them compared to most people here in town that I know have close range cards but don't quite hit me. I took all my benchmarks by leaving ALL of the nvidia settings the same (except for the memory and core speeds when doing the overclocking tests), and ALL of the 3Dmark settings the same at all times. I had AA an AF set to application controlled and V-Sync was on for both OpenGL and Direct3D.
I'm using the 56.72 drivers by the way. the 56.72 and the 56.64 are pretty much the same thing when it comes to this card. Just a couple of points more when doing 3DMark.
Hope this is enough info for now. I don't know if the a360 is still available still, last I checked for it on newegg, it wasn't there. If all else fails, someone said that a refurb 9800pro on the forums or newegg might happen to be found for $150 too. Just keep an eye out and keep us up to date
.
~C.P.
