AlphaWing wrote:
5700 ultra's are basically rebranded 5800's, they have a normal quiet fan, but still have the good sink of the 5800 and use ddr2 like the 5800, a very under-rated card.
They are no such thing. FX 5700 is NV36 and is derived from the NV35-refresh and released alongside the NV38 (FX 59590); they include the improvements to the shader units (including the third vertex shader that 5800 does not have). They are also missing 4 TMUs (and about 40M transistors) versus the NV30. The shader improvements will generally give them an advantage with SM2.0/DX9 content over NV30-derived parts (as with any comparison between NV30 and NV35), although against the 5800 Ultra they will likely be slower due to their lower clockspeed, lower TMU count, lower memory bandwidth, etc (I will also say the 5800U has been slightly faster than the 5900XT in my informal testing, and the 5900XT is generally faster than the 5700 series). They are available with either GDDR2 (early) and GDDR3 (later and ostensibly more common) variants, however the GDDR2 is clocked lower than on the 5800 series boards, as is the GPU. They use generally less power than the 5800 series, and require less substantial cooling (the reference 5700 boards are single-slot; the 5800 reference designs use dual-slot coolers - the 5800 Vanilla's cooler is very similar to what was later used on the 5900 Ultra). In general if you're going after a 5700 you want the GDDR3 variant, as they're faster. The 5900XT is a "better" choice though, imho, as it gives you the full 8 TMUs and 256-bit memory, and is more similar to the 5800 Ultra in terms of performance.
There is no "rebranded 5800" (e.g. NV30-based part) outside of the Quadro FX 1000 and 2000; the FX 1000 is a single-slot card, but is run at dramatically lower clocks than the "full" NV30 boards (FX 2000 and 5800 Vanilla both run at 400/800, and the 5800 Ultra at 500/1000 - the FX 1000 runs at clocks similar to the 5800 Ultra's idle/low-power state, which allows for it to be a physically smaller card (the 5800 Ultra can turn its fan off in idle/low-power)).
The base 5900 series does not use a blower fan of any sort - the 5900SE/XT/etc uses a relatively similar single-slot design to some of the GeForce 4 Ti and FX 5700 Ultra boards, and the 5900/5900 Ultra uses a cooler more similar to the 5800 Vanilla/FX 2000. Only the 5800 Ultra and 5950 Ultra actually included blowers in their reference designs (Flow FX and Flow FX II, respectively), although third-party makers like Abit and Gainward implemented blowers on some of their boards, and there are aftermarket coolers like the NV Silencer that use a blower design.
The simple single-slot sink design on the 5600/5700/5900XT is not suitable for fanless operation. The 5800 Ultra's cooler is only suitable for continuous fanless operation when the card is in low power mode; in performance mode the fan will (at minimum) cycle on and off, or (at maximum) run continuously until the card leaves performance mode (from my own observations it seems to depend on two factors: ambient temperature and complexity of the 3D load).
