eVGA's GeForce FX 5700 Personal Cinema - Nipping at ATI's heels

Final Words

The eVGA GeForce FX 5700 Personal Cinema does a lot of things that has brought NVIDIA up to speed with ATI, but what is still lacking is the type of software support needed to really make for a good dueling match. As we explained in our FWM review, it has some "holes" in it, since there some issues regarding how hard it is to use NVRemote when we bring another X10 made remote into the environment (i.e. Remote Wonder), and the software interface that NVIDIA has for it cannot distinguish which remote is which.

Because software has such a larger bearing on hardware when it comes to multimedia cards, we cannot say FWM has no merit on this card. Granted, it is the only card shipping with FWM at the moment, but FWM isn't really complete in our eyes. It lacks a 10 ft. UI and kind of feels like a single frame loading separate modules for each function. And the fact that this card in combination with FWM eats up 100% of a P4 2.4B GHz CPU's resources when it is on high timeshifting is still a bit much.

Meanwhile, the card itself has pretty good HDTV support, in our opinion. And compared to some of the other multimedia cards on the market, the overscan shift compensation that NVIDIA provides to answer HDTV output overscanning is nice and simple.

If you can wait a few months, that would probably be best, since you can make sure that NVIDIA posts their 10 ft. UI version of FWM in the fall. Those who buy now risk NVIDIA announcing another delay, which is why we would recommend that you go after an ATI multimedia solution (AIW or TV Wonder) for those more anxious buyers.

For those just looking for a card to output HDTV, this may be a card to consider. The newer GeForce 6800 cards are supposed to support HDTV resolutions, but technically, it really isn't official, since you can't just go out and buy one and get those resolutions running via DVI output without doing some clever modifications (or so we hear).

Until NVIDIA comes out with an official and more surefire way of outputting from a GeForce FX 5900 or GeForce 6800 by way of newer drivers (support is suppose to come with 65 rev. where DVI is a connector type for TV input) or a dongle (for those limited to component inputs), this Personal Cinema card does the overscan fix in a much simpler method than ATI. Though, whether or not it is better is up for debate.

ATI's overscan fix is basically to create custom resolution profiles for windows' display settings; custom width and height specifications for a specific desktop resolution and output for a specific DTV resolution (i.e. we used a custom desktop resolution of 1248 x 700 derived from a 1280 x 720 original desktop resolution for a 720p output with basically no overscan). Since the 5700 GPU isn't new and fits in somewhere with the mid/mid-low range products, the fact that this Personal Cinema card looks to be the fastest multimedia card from NVIDIA out there with component output brings mixed conclusions. (InnoVision has a GeForce FX 5900 Personal Cinema, but it looks to be a card that crammed the faster GPU on an older reference design, in our opinion, and it doesn't ship with FWM, by the way; nor have we found a store in North America selling it. - no component output) If you are looking for something faster to power your HDTV, you are better off waiting till NVIDIA releases support for their more recent cards by way of drivers and/or a dongle. (Leadtek does have a GeForce FX 5950 with component-out, but we have yet to look at it.)