AquaMark3

Unreal Tournament 2003

As expected, the GDDR3-equipped FX 5700 Ultra's slight memory bandwidth edge has only a negligible impact on frame rates in AquaMark3 or Unreal Tournament 2003.

Power consumption
To test GDDR3's more frugal voltage requirements, I measured the power consumption of our test system with a watt meter. Power consumption was tested for an hour at idle and under load. For our load test, I used a looping 3DMark03 "Mother Nature" demo with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering at 1600x1200. Since our watt meter measures power consumption at the outlet, the figures below represent the power consumption of the entire test system rather than the graphics card alone.

At idle, the GDDR3-equipped GeForce FX 5700 Ultra helps our test system consume just over 10% less power than with the DDR2 version of the 5700 Ultra. Under load, the power consumption savings drops to 7%, likely because the GPU consumes more power while crunching through the Mother Nature test.

Overclocking
I was able to overclock the GDDR3-equipped FX 5700 Ultra's memory to 1050MHz without any stability issues or visual artifacts. The 100MHz boost over stock speeds is nice, but it's nothing to really write home about. Of course, just because my sample's memory only made it to 1050MHz doesn't mean that all GDDR3-equipped 5700 Ultras will hit a wall at 1050MHz; some may have no problems running faster, and others may not overclock at all. As is always the case with overclocking, your mileage may vary.