View Single Post - Bought a new video card

polatouche · Rated PG

OK, so here's a review of the Volari V5 128MB graphics card.

Video card manufacturers may hype their top end offerings, but let's face it, not everybody can afford to pay for such novelties and get a loan just to play a game. That's the reason why we see more and more cards targeting the mainstream and also entry level market. XGI has released their Volari series video cards to fill this market segment, and the card we're looking at today, the Volari V5, targets the $50-60 price range market. Let's see how this card fares compared to the GeforceFX 5200.

The Volari V5 card:

The Volari V5 is a fairly standard mid-sized board sporting a black PCB. The card is intended to be a low-to-mainstream 3D gaming product. Considering its price range, its competition would be from the likes of Nvidia's FX 5200 or ATI's 9250 videocards.
The card comes with a fan mounted on a heatsink covering both the graphics processor and the memory. I appreciated the fact that the heatsink also covers the memory, yet small enough not to occupy any slot.

There is a nice fan on the heatsink, or to be more precise a Blue LED fan which shines when the computer is on. Petty cool in my opinion for an entry level card.

The V5 supports dual monitors, and comes with both an S-Video connection for TV-out and a DVI connector for digital flat panels. An adaptor could be attached to drive dual analog monitors. The integrated TV-Out is capable of displaying in HDTV resolutions.
As for the main specs of the card itself, the core is clocked at 300 Mhz and the card comes with 128MB of DDR memory (Samsung brand) clocked at 250 Mhz (effective 500Mhz DDR). The Volari V5 uses four pixel pipelines with two vertex and two pixel shaders, all fully DirectX 9 compatible.

Since the card has a standard size, installation of the card was a breeze, it was very simple.

Performance:

I was happy to see that every game I have ran great, well beyond my expectations for a card in this price range.

Interestingly, the memory and heatsink stayed fairly cool during benchmarking. As for the rear of the card, it got fairly warm during the same time period, but never hot.

Below are the results I obtained, resolution is 1024x768, all details are set to Highest, but no FSAA enabled

3dmark03
Volari V5 : 1622 points
Sparkle GeforceFX 5200 : 1065 points

3dmark 2001SE
Volari V5 : 8762 points
Sparkle GeforceFX 5200 : 5081 points

X2 The Threat
Volari V5 : 41 fps
Sparkle GeforceFX 5200 : 25,2 fps

UT 2003
Volari V5 : 45,9 fps
Sparkle GeforceFX 5200 : 41,9 fps

Far Cry 1.1
Volari V5 : 37,9 fps
Sparkle GeforceFX 5200 : 28,2 fps

As for overclocking, I was easily able to overclock the card from default 300/500 to 350/660 and received no artifacts.