. > Read more

Identical to this card with the exception of the cooler. The cooler on this card looks more mainstream and luckily is a lot more quiet. You can still hear it blow air a lot but it doesn't have the high pitch noise. > Read more

In March 2003 nVidia released the FX 5200 and FX 5600 cards to complete the line-up (the FX 5800 was released 2 months earlier). Each model also had an Ultra variant that was basically identical but had a faster clocked GPU and memory. This ASUS GeForce FX 5600 is one of the early FX cards with it's chip date of early april 2003. I think it was a nice card back in it's day if the price was right and you'd be upgrading a system with a GeForce 2-era chip. Those who already had a GeForce 4 Ti better waited for the newer FX-series to be released or should've switched over to ATi's Radeon. Why? See these benchmarks I've done with a similar FX 5600 and notice that it often falls behind the GeForce 4 Ti4200. > Read more

The GeForce FX 5600 XT has the same chip fitted as the normal GeForce FX 5600, except that the nVidia NV31 GPU runs at a slower pace. Besides a lower core-clock the XT also features slower memory and uses less advanced components on the PCB. Take a look at the PCB and notice that the capacitors are of lower quality than the ones on the XFX GeForce FX 5600.

This particular AOpen version also has two flaws: a loud cooling solution and it's 64-bit memory bus. It looks like the PCB is able to run 128-bit just fine if they used more memory chips. It would've increased performance a lot with these cards. > Read more

The GeForce FX 5600 came in different forms and shapes. This particular MSI card is quite well equipped, however. Despite that the GeForce FX 5600XT was, by far, not a performance product they included a good cooling solution and delivered a card with a 128-bit memory bus. It is nowhere as fast as the regular GeForce FX 5600 but it is almost 50% faster than GeForce FX 5600XT models that did have to face the constraints of a narrow 64-bit memory bus. > Read more

Back in summer of 2003 this was my fastest graphics card. I bought it new and kept it ever since.

In the old days I was always looking for a way to increase the performance of my PC (which was an Athlon XP 1700+ Thoroughbred B with nForce2), so I overclocked and tweaked every part in my PC. Due to this the FX 5600 'suffered' a lot in terms of modifications in cooling and overclocking but it still works fine. This is a very robust card! > Read more