- Joined
- May 18, 2004
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Day before yesterday, i overhauled my sisters computer. What was an ageing machine (that stopped working because the hard drive blew up, see my post about that box on the wall in her room) is now a speedy little computer that will stand a chance at running todays latest games at high settings.
In this thread, i will be reviewing specifically the PNY Verto FX5700LE 128Mb availiable from eBuyer at a tad under £51 including VAT.
Test rig:
Abit KV7 (Via KT600) Socket A
AMD Athlon 2000 (Overclocked to 1718MHz)
256Mb Hynix DDR266 PC2100 RAM
80Gb Seagate Barracuda 7 SATA (7200rpm 8Mb)
PNY Verto GeForce FX5700LE 128Mb AGP8x
Arianet 430w PSU
Samsung CD-RW/DVD Combo
Floppy Drive
Keyboard... ok ok i'll stop now
Righto, We shall begin.
First impressions? Nice box! Colourful, lots of information, pretty good. Well made cardboard and well constructed design.
Lets take a look at the inside:
Oh dear. Not best impressed - PNY supply a tacky plastic tray to hold the card and accessories and the CD and documentation are under, laying loose in the bottom of the box.
Dissapointing? yes. Do i care? no. At the end of the day, who cares how it's packaged. Just as long as everything arrives in good condition.
What do we get in the box then?
As you can see, we get the card, manual, CD but also a DVI 2 VGA converter and a couple of cables for using the TV out function - Composite and S-Video.
Lets have a look at the actual card then:
Well from all the reviews i read on 5700LE's on the web before buying this, i wasn't actually expecting a fan. Good move by PNY to install active cooling on their product (all be it a very small fan, but better than passive cooling) because i have heard that these cards overclock phenomenally! More on that later.
The card is also very small - i read that it is small than some GeForce 4 MX cards. This is good because it will not get in the way of any 3.5" devices you install internally. It requires no external power.
The card fits nicely into the AGP slot. No issues there. Note that i moved the PCI exhaust fan DOWN one slot, so it does not get in the way of the cards onboard fan but would still draw warm air away from all the memory and capacitors and also take away some of the warm air that the fan chucks out.
And to reiterate what i said earlier, the card is not long so as you can see it will not get in the way of anything. Note that the Abit KV7 is a VERY narrow board, most are nearly 1.5 times wider. Still the card is not overhanging the IDE ports. Impressed.
Overclocking...
This is what i had been waiting to do. I read extreme reviews of 150MHz overclocks on the cores. Rubbish i thought...
The stock speeds given by the nVidia overclock facility provided with the latest Omega drivers showed that the card runs at 225MHz Core and 400MHz Memory
Stock Speeds
Up it went...
285MHz Core 419MHz Memory
300MHz Core 450MHz Memory
325MHz Core 475MHz Memory
And that's where i ran out of time. Even on the highest overclock, there was NO artifacting visible in 3DMark03, and there was nothing to stop me pushing the clock speeds higher, apart from the nVidia overclocking facilty telling me it wouldnt work, even 1MHz higher. Rubbish... I want to SEE that it wont work. I'll dig out riva tuner at some point and see at what speeds it starts to artifact and become unstable.
The point, However, Is made. This card is an amazing overclocker!
I don't know what speeds a standard 5700 runs at but i'm sure this is somewhere near it and its under half the price. The cards are essentially the same also - they both use the same core, the LE is just underclocked, hence the large overclock achieved.
In my opinion? A good card, for the money. Of course if you have shd loads of cash, go get yourself an X800 or 6800GT, but if your strapped for cash and cant decide between an FX5200, a 9200 or a 9600SE, choose neither, get one of these.
8.5 out of 10 PostillMark04 Marks
