MSI GeForce FX5600 card: The Little Red Devil

MSI IS THESE days right at the board and card forefront - we saw its 875P Neo board with some unique features, like dynamic overclocking. Here I took a look at its GeForce FX5600 card.

A nice red piece of artwork - red PCB with large copper heatsink assembly, and the usual stuff for a FX5600 card - 128 MB DDR RAM, DVI and VGA outputs, AGP 8X connector. Plus, there is a dedicated connector for MSI's own TV/Video switchbox, with S-Video and TV - in and out connectors plus remote control. As usual with MSI, there is plenty of software thrown in the package: MSI 3D Desktop to give you a taste of 3D user interface before MS Longhorn arrives, InterVideo WinDVD 5.1 player plus Producer and Coder, MSI Media Center Deluxe, VirtualDrive and RestoreIt by FarStone. Add to that the games like Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls III, Ghost Recon, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, plus few others as well.

Test Setup
I tested the card with a Pentium 4 3GHz Canterwood system using an Intel 875PBZ mainboard, 512 MB of OCZ 3200 low latency Platinum 2-3-2-6 DDR RAM, and a 120 GB SATA HDD from Seagate. The whole thing ran one of supposedly world's biggest and most expensive viruses, called Windows XP Pro SP1. Well, it can't be the biggest and most expensive one, that should be Windows Server 2003) with freshly baked Detonator 44.90 beta.

Here are the results!

Overclocking
As you can see, the card overclocks reasonably well - and the benefits are there on the benchmark results. It's pretty much in line with other good FX5600 cards - after all, it is the memory bandwidth, not just the GPU core, that is the critical factor there.

Why I'm saying that? Well, you can see that, when you leave the GPU core speed the same, but up the memory speed from 550 to 650 MHz DDR, the scores jump across the board by about 6% to 10%, not bad for just a 18% memory speed scaling. Once you move to 333/666 MHz, the benchmark gain is proportional to the clock speed gain, around 2.5%. Now, when going to the maximum stable GPU core speed we could get, the 350 MHz, yet leaving the memory speed at 666 MHz, the speedup was around 3% on average, also less than the 5% core MHz speedup.

Overall, a good card in a nice package, and lots of extras. µ

Clock rate GPU RAM		325/550MHz	325/650MHz	333/666MHz	350/666MHz
1028x1024		default
3DMark03		1873	1992	2050	2118
Game 1	fps	92.6	100	102.4	105
Game 2	fps	10.6	11.3	11.7	12
Game 3	fps	9.4	9.9	10.3	10.6
Game 4	fps	9.5	9.8	10.1	10.5
Fill single texture	Mtexel/s	810.8	939.2	971.3	977.3
Fill multi-texture	Mtexel/s	1079.5	1123.5	1158.4	1204.3
Vertex Shader	fps	5.6	5.7	5.8	6.1
Pixel Shader	fps	10.2	10.7	11	11.4
Ragtroll	fps	6.6	7.2	7.4	7.6