PNY Verto nVidia GeForce FX5700LE 128Mb TVout/DVI - The Lowdown!

[Ian]

Bought one of these cards today Chris on your recommendation, only problem was the PC takes PCI-E cards (which I totally forgot about!). Ended up taking it back but it was a bargain for £50 for the card + FarCry!

 

[ChristopherP]

lol! ian... d'oh!!

what comp you got then, must be pretty new?

 

[Ian]

Its a PC for my dad, a Dell 4700 (came to £200 including a monitor) - very basic, but has a CDRW, 17" monitor, 512Ram and 160GB Drive so was pretty much ideal for an internet/basic gaming PC.

As it happens, the onboard graphics card isn't as bad as I thought! It can run "The Sims 2" pretty well!

 

[ChristopherP]

thats a REALLLLLY good deal!

 

[Turini]

guys i ordered this card but 256 mb and i think diff company will it work great because i really need to start gaming again and i want to know if it is good

 

[floppybootstomp]

Good review Chris, and something I'm interested in right now

I've inherited the following system as I gave one of my 2Ghz machines to my twins, this is their old one:

Abit KT7-R
Athlon 1.2 / Thermaltake Volcano cooler
256Mb Crucial SDR133
SB16 Sound Card
Maxtor 20Gb IDE 7200 ATA133
L & C 300W PSU
16 x DVD ROM Drive
Leadtek Geoforce 2 64Mb vid card
Floppy drive
NIC Card
Generic beige case.

This is actually my first 'real' motherboard, come back to haunt me

Loaded WIN 98SE on it as I thought I'd use it for old games that won't run on WIN XP.

Trouble is, the video card don't cut the mustard, it won't run Nocturne or American McGhee's Alice at all. And even games that do run on it, like Half Life & Quake 2, look a bit crap.

I was considering 256Mb more RAM from Crucial (£34.06) and maybe a 9600XT.

But this FX5700LE looks very interesting, I think it would fit the bill just right, so thanks for doing your tests and writing the review

Where did you buy yours from and how much was it? And Ian, where did you buy yours from (then take it back) was it PC World at all?

The 9600XT is around £105.00, I really didn't want to spend that much on a card just for old games, so if the 5700LE is a fair price, I may well go for one.

 

[ChristopherP]

£50.88 inc VAT www.ebuyer.com ...!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Thanks Chris, already had a look around, overclockers have one for the same price.

With a VGA Arctic cooler and shipping cost, the whole deal comes to £74.50 aprox.

Which I figure is a good deal so I shall probably order one shortly.

Had a look in PC World today and they wanted £100.00 for it

And I think another is deserved for you even thinking about pointing me to e-buyer, lol

I would rather bite my own arm off than buy from those low-lifes.

 

[Kenny]

U dont like ebuyer?? May I ask why?

-> Well... no matter what ur answer is... I`ve asked anyway! :-D

 

[ChristopherP]

I was a bit touchy about using them for a while, from hearing what you had to say...

We just ordered a £300 telly from them, arrived on time!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Why don't I like e-buyer?

Simple, their after sales service is practically non-existent and they messed me about a few times a few years back.

They are cheap, and coupled with the word 'cheap' is usually 'nasty'. It fits here.

Chris, I just hope your TV doesn't break down during it's warranty period

Fur further reading, see the e-buyer thread in this Forum's Retailer's rating section, there's a few eye-openers there.

 

[Kenny]

Me?? What did I say against them? (no clear recollection of that, your Honour...)

 

[floppybootstomp]

Me?? What did I say against them? (no clear recollection of that, your Honour...)

lol, I not taking a pop at you

You asked, and I spouted forth

btw, I ordered the XFX FX5700LE from overclockers (Esnet) and the Arctic VGA Cooler, ordered it on Tuesday and it's status atm is 'In warehouse, packed, awaiting despatch'.

Kinda looking forward to trying this thing out

 

[ChristopherP]

Philips 3 year onsite warranty (swap out) me thinks...!

Wouldn't be stoopid enough to get something without...

 

[Kenny]

You`ll enjoy trying it Flops, trust me I`ve had hours of fun bumping up the speeds... Which is what its all about really, just as much as playing games with it...

 

[Moco]

the 5700LE (nv36 chip) is the same gpu as the regular 5700. which the core starts at 500 on most brands and i've seen oc'd to 585mhz. so if your wondering how far you can go, there it is. the mem clock does not oc nearly as far but is still plenty fast enough and generates too much heat to push it too far. it will even run doom3 at high w/o problems as long as AA and FSAA is turned off. the only game this card has a problem with is far cry. and not because its too gfx intensive. its has to do wiith the fact that on that game, it only ran at 16-bit precision instead of nividias normal 32-bit. the latest drivers have corrected this to run at 32-bit (ati always runs at 24-bit). But with higher precision you of course slow down the fps. which only takes noticable effect at very high settings. all in all, a great card for for a low price tag, even new its only 80-120 dollars, U.S. and of course when i say 32-bit i mean floating point precision and not normal graphic architecture whih runs up to 256-bit. Hope this is helpful.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Thanks for the input Moco, and welcome to PC Review

Kenny, I have the card now, have fitted it, but the Arctic VGA cooler I ordered was the wrong one, I ordered a cooler for a 5700 Ultra. Doh. Maybe Overclcockers will take it back, maybe not, don't know really, as it was my fault for ordering the wrong one.

I shall phone them Tuesday and see. Hope that's not sixteen quid up the wall

However, the XFX 5700LE has a decent heat sink and fan on it and I've overclocked it to 342 Core & 587 Memory and it's running stable.

But, I think the motherboard I'm using may be suspect, an Abit KT7-R, as I still have the same problems I had when using the GeForce 2 64Mb card. That is, some games just won't run (even when the video card is at stock speeds).

I have a spare Gigabyte GA700N Pro 2 Motherboard so I've decided to try that. I can still use the Athlon 1.2Ghz CPU in it but I need to get some DDR RAM.

Once I have that and one way or another got the correct Arctic VGA Cooler, I shall see how far we can take this thing

 

[Moco]

ty and how is your games not running, any error msgs? does it just not show the pic? or auto-minimizes?

 

[floppybootstomp]

Using Win 98, put this machine together just to play old games. Also have a swapout Hard Disk caddy so can slot some Linux Distros in there to mess about with as well.

Games that won't run are Nocturne, American McGhee's Alice and NFS Porsche 2000.

Non graphics-intensive games, such as The Longest Journey, run OK. Everything else works OK.

Basically, I get garbage on the screen and the machine freezes.

I have agp set to x 4 in Bios (highest speed for this board). Can't really think of much else to mess with, any ideas?

 

[Kenny]

Drivers? Dunno... Cant think of anything else

I dont have Arctic cooling fitted on my card and it`ll benchmark at core=500. Hope that gives you some confidence when u get a chance to give it another pounding. Cant play games at those speeds thought- too much heat...