Hardware Reviews: Wondering how my graphics card look liked?

From HWZ:

MSI FX5900 XT-VTD128

Fondly referred as the brand with the sunflower cooler design, the MSI FX5900 XT-VTD128 sported a slim version of that copper cooler that would fit within a single slot. At its center, it had a large, but quiet 55mm fan to keep the card cooled. This card was second only to Albatron in terms of overclocking and the MSI card might have had a chance to even outshine the Albatron if it had RAMsinks as a standard feature. Although only the second best at overclocking, it achieved this while keeping the card whisper quiet and at lower temperatures than the Albatron. To some of us, these latter factors might be more practical and important than overclocking, which MSI still ranked as one of the top few cards.

The front face of the MSI FX5900 XT-VTD128.

A close look at the copper sunflower graphics card cooler.

It was equipped with only Samsung’s 700MHz DDR graphics memory chips, but its actual overclocking capability was much more than that.

It was interesting to find that the RAM chips used were Samsung's 2.86ns (350MHz clock = 700MHz DDR) ones, yet it was certified for even MSI's maximum DOT (dynamic overclocking technology) strength that would have called for the RAM to operate at 770MHz DDR. This is definitely a sign that MSI is handpicking the correct batch of RAM chips to ensure that their graphics cards can run at speeds high enough to meet up with the DOT demands. Let us see the performance gains with maximum DOT which gives the card a 10% boost in GPU and RAM clock speeds:-

At low resolutions, the extra speed gave the card only 3% to 6% improvement while moving to high resolutions gave us close to 10% net speed boost. Remember, DOT is endorsed by MSI, which means as long as you install their custom drivers to enable whichever DOT setting you choose, it is covered by the warranty. As such, MSI's FX5900 XT-VTD128 is certainly the fastest certified GeForce FX 5900XT graphics card in the market. This isn't the maximum potential and in our manual overclocking trials, we found that the MSI FX5900 XT-VTD128 ranked second best in overclocked performance.

Among all the GeForce FX 5900XT graphics cards in retail, MSI is the only vendor that equipped the card with a video decoder chip for video capture functions. So if you need a relatively inexpensive video capture feature while upgrading to a GeForce FX 5900XT graphics card, there is only one choice.

This is the Philips SAA7114H video capture IC.

MSI used the new reduced package size SiI1162 DVI controller for DVI equipped monitors.

Here's a brief listing of all the items in product package:-