Introduction

A quick glance into your favorite computer mart would reveal the abundance of GeForce FX 5200 and FX 5600 graphics cards, but some of you may have difficulty locating their higher performing Ultra versions. Definitely they are available but the quantity and variety are certainly not on level with the more affordable non-Ultra variants. So, what’s keeping them? As much as some of us would like to get our hands on them, the truth is that NVIDIA is facing a GPU component shortage for these parts and could be a little while before they bounce back to normal. This is why there are limited vendors offering perhaps only a maximum of one version. MSI is a strong NVIDIA graphics card vendor who usually has multiple configurations for each GPU, but for the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, they have only a solo version, which is the FX5600U-VTD128.

The vibrant and striking outlook of the MSI FX5600U-VTD128 graphics card.

A closer look at the GPU cooler and RAMsinks.

The Philips video decoder chip offers the useful video capture function. To take advanatge of this hardware, MSI has also provided appropriate software.

The FX5600U-VTD128 is based on MSI’s customary red PCB with an integrated a Philips video decoder chip, a large 128MB of frame buffer with copper-coated RAMsink and MSI T.O.P. Tech cooling for the GPU. With the GPU’s built-in video encoder and the Philips video decoder chip, this card supports video input and video output (VIVO) options with MSI’s usual video break-out box and video extension cables (also provided).

The following are the list of items found in this graphics card package:-

MSI FX5600U-VTD128 128MB graphics card

MSI graphics card manual

MSI VIVO breakout box

S-Video extension cable

DVI-I to DB-15 converter

Y-Power cable

11 CDs that encompasses 20 Utilities and 10 Games

Also accompanying the product is a whole host of games, utilities and software that even includes Adobe’s Photoshop Album SE. At every GPU level, MSI has set new records for the quantity and quality of software goodies offered and the FX5600U-VTD128 has proven it once again. The complete listing can be found within the specifications table below:-

MSI FX5600U-VTD128 Technical Specifications

Graphics Engine	NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra GPU High Precision 3D Rendering Engine 4 pixels per clock rendering engine Full 128-bit Precision Graphics Pipeline Native support for 128-bit / 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering modes Up to 8 textures per pass CineFX Engine Support for DX 9.0 Pixel Shader 2.0+ Support for DX 9.0 Vertex Shader 2.0+ Very long pixel programs up to 1024 instructions Very long vertex programs with up to 256 static instructions and up to 65536 instructions executed before termination Subroutines in shader programs Dynamic flow control Procedural shading Z-correct bump-mapping Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers Two-sided stencil Keyframe animation Programmable matrix palette skinning Custom lens effects: fish eye, wide angle,fresnel effects, water refraction Intellisample Technology Loss-less Color Compression and Z Compression (up to 4:1 ratio in real time) Fast Z-clear Adaptive texture filtering Dynamic Gamma Correction Fast antialiasing and compression performance DirectX and S3TC texture compression Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions up to 1024x768 with built-in Macrovision copy protection Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external HDTV encoders Support for dual-link DVI with resolutions support of 1600x1200. High-performance 2D rendering engine Digital Vibrance Control 3.0 (DVC) nView Multi-display Technology Default clock speed in 2D environment: 235/800 MHz (core/DDR memory) Default clock speed in 3D environment: 400/800 MHZ (core/DDR memory) 128-bit  memory interface 12.8GB/sec Memory Bandwidth AGP 8X including fast writes and sideband addressing Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management Microsoft DirectX 9.0 optimizations and support OpenGL 1.4 optimizations and support
Graphics Memory	128MB DDR I SDRAM of 400MHz clock rate (effective speed of 800MHz DDR)
RAMDAC	Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz
Video Decoder	Philips SAA7114H
Connectors	1x analog RGB connector 1x mini-DIN connector (for Video-in / Video-out) 1x DVI-I connector (for Digital Flat Panel displays)
Drivers	Driver support for Microsoft Windows 95/98/98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP, Linux IA32 / IA64 / AMD64 and FreeBSD NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with NVIDIA extensions Complete DirectX support including 9.0 and lower
Software / Games	Adobe Photoshop Album SE 3D Album SE InterVideo WinDVD Creator Plus InterVideo WinDVD 5.1 Channel & Supreme Foreign Language Learning Machine FarStone VirtualDrive & RestoreIT! Trend Micro PC-cillin 2002 ThinSoft Be Twin Media Ring Dialer E-Color 3Deep MSI Utilities (LockBox,  GoodMEM, SecureDoc, 3D Turbo, Live Update and more) MSI 3D Desktop MSI Media Center Deluxe II Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon The Elder Scrolls III : Morrowind (2 discs) Duke Nukem Manhattan Project 7-in-1 Games Collections : The Sum of All Fears, Beam Breakers, IL-2 Sturmovik, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Rally Trophy, Beam Breakers, Zax: The Alien Hunter, Oni
Other Information	AGP 2.0/3.0 slot required 1 PCI-assigned IRQ Required