Owners of Chaintech's products have come to appreciate the extras that Chaintech add to their motherboard and graphics products. In a market filled to the brim with similar products, it is the subtle differences that can set one manufacturer apart from the competition. In some cases, unique products tend to command a higher retail price, but in many cases the investment is worthwhile.
Chaintech USA
Chaintech aims to provide consumers with multiple product configurations, which is the case with their standard GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and their GeForce FX 5700 Ultra AA5700U Apogee. While the AA5700U Apogee sports a slightly higher price tag, Pricewatch shows the AA5700U Apogee selling for $14 more than the lowest priced GeForce FX 5700 Ultra from Chaintech.
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra Logo
NVIDIA enlisted the services of IBM to manufacture the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics processing unit at their East Fishkill plant in New York. A rundown of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra's specifications:
0.13-Micron Process
256-Bit Graphics Core
128-Bit Memory Interface
4 Pixels Per Clock
475MHz Core Clock
450MHz DDR2 Memory
14.4GB/Sec. Memory Bandwidth
400MHz Dual RAMDAC
NVIDIA CineFX 2.0 Engine
UltraShadow Technology
NVIDIA nView Multi-Display Technology
Supports AGP 8X, 4X, And 2X
NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control 3.0
128-Bit Precision Color
Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering
Hardware MPEG-2 Support
DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.4 Support
Although the name of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra may not sound like a huge jump over the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, it did bring a number of new features to the mid-range market. Chief among the enhancements was the incorporation of the CineFX 2.0 engine, which improved the performance of DirectX 9 based applications and games.
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra Graphics Processing Unit
The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra was given two additional vertex shader processing units bringing it up to a total of three, which is the same number of vertex shaders as the higher-end GeForce FX 5900 series of graphics cards. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is outfitted with 128MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 450MHz, or 900MHz effective, which can churn out 14.4GB/sec. of memory bandwidth over a 128-bit wide bus.
