The only time Nvidia openly mocked its own graphics card
These days we all yearn for an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, but twenty years ago it was a completely different story. Some Nvidia GPUs impressed with their immense capabilities, while others became laughingstocks and crashed and burned.
The GPU that I am about to present to you, or perhaps remind you of, falls firmly into the second category.
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This may be the only GPU Nvidia officially makes fun of
He’s earned his different nicknames, that’s for sure.
Nvidia is now the market leader in every sense of the word, and it’s hard to imagine it making fun of its own products, but it has happened, and the video above is proof. It shows a group of Nvidia executives in the early 2000s discussing the Nvidia FX 5800 Ultra, nicknamed “Dustbuster”, “leaf blower” or “hair dryer”.
The GPU had fully deserved its nickname. It caused more complaints than just the noise, but the noise made it famous.
The video, titled “The Decibel Dilemma,” shows a group of Nvidia executives at a roundtable discussion, discussing the FX 5800 Ultra and the possibility of it becoming the “Harley-Davidson of computer graphics.” This implied that the noise, seemingly so iconic, could become a selling point rather than something to hate. To emphasize this point, the video shows the card being used as a hairdryer, coffee grinder, and leaf blower, because that’s what it looked like at full clock speed.
Nvidia’s video was a response to very real user complaints, but it didn’t explain why the GPU was so noisy in the first place, nor did it address the fact that some of its biggest problems had little to do with noise.
Why the FX 5800 Ultra became the “leaf blower” GPU
This kind of noise level was almost inevitable.
Was the FX 5800 Ultra always intended to become the “Dustbuster” of Nvidia’s GPU lineup? It’s hard to say, but from the start she certainly bore the marks of a loud card.
The FX 5800 Ultra, codenamed NV30, was Nvidia’s first DirectX 9 compatible graphics card. It was made on TSMC’s new 130nm process with 125 million transistors, which sounds like a joke by today’s standards, but it was a big deal at the time, and it almost doubled the complexity of the previous NV25 chip. Many had high hopes for the FX 5800 Ultra, but old threads reveal deep disappointment.
The card ran at aggressive memory speeds of 500 MHz and 1 GHz, using 128 MB of expensive GDDR2 memory on a 128-bit bus. All that juice needed ample cooling, but also plenty of power, as the card required external power via a 4-pin Molex connector. Forgetting to plug it in meant that the FX 5800 Ultra underclocked significantly, which remains a valid power-saving strategy to this day.
Nvidia’s FX Flow cooling system was packaged in a dual-slot design, but it packed a lot into that form factor, with three heat pipes, a ducted fan mechanism, and copper heatsinks. It was also equipped with a high-speed centrifugal fan which, as you have now heard, did its best (and then some).
Old Anandtech data pegged the GPU at 77 dBA when running at full speed. It was noisier than competing cards from ATI (now AMD), but unfortunately all that power didn’t translate into extreme performance.
How ATI Made the FX 5800 Ultra Even Worse
ATI had the highest position.
Just as trade between Nvidia and AMD is booming today (although a new competitor may be on the horizon), Nvidia and ATI, which was later acquired by AMD, were also rivals in the early days of computer graphics. You could argue that these days it’s not much of a competition, with Nvidia owning as much as 92% of the consumer discrete GPU market. Back then, it was a much more heated rivalry, and even Nvidia fans praised ATI by comparing it to the FX 5800 Ultra.
The FX 5800 Ultra launched at a brutal time, sandwiched between two arguably better ATI cards in many ways. One of these came out around the same time, instantly making the FX 5800 Ultra obsolete.
ATI had a significant head start in DirectX 9 games, as well as some architectural advantages that helped it succeed in benchmarks. Tom’s Hardware noted in its review of the Radeon 9800 Pro in 2003 that the FX 5800 Ultra sported a more 4×2 pixel pipeline design as opposed to the 8×1 provided by ATI. As a result, ATI’s Radeon 9800 Pro could render twice as many textured pixels per clock cycle.
There you have it: Nvidia’s FX 5800 Ultra, the infamous Dustbuster, may have had better specs than the Radeon 9700/9800 Pro, but that didn’t help it succeed. Comparable in terms of reference to the 9700, but noisier and more expensive, it is remembered not for its power, but for its noise levels.
The FX 5800 Ultra changed GPUs forever again
For better or for worse.
It’s easy to remember the FX 5800 Ultra as just a punchline, but it helped standardize some GPU realities that are still the norm today.
The cooler, while obnoxiously loud, paved the way for flagship GPU cooling as an industrial design. Aftermarket coolers did the trick before (and were actually a better solution than Nvidia’s integrated cooler on the FX 5800 Ultra, according to some forum posts), but the GPU ushered in the era we still live in, that of integrated cooling solutions.
Nvidia also learned some crucial lessons from how the FX 5800 Ultra was received. It released the FX 5900 series shortly after, with all the fixes the FX 5800 Ultra could only dream of.
The 5900 had a larger memory bus (256 bits versus 128 bits). It had slightly lower clocks, but it could still keep up with the Radeon 9800 Pro. It used cheaper DDR memory, which sounds like a downgrade, but it helped keep manufacturing costs down, and at the time most users didn’t see the benefit of using GDDR2. Above all, it had a much quieter cooling solution, finally putting an end to the Dustbuster nickname.
For the Nvidia FX 5900 Ultra to work, the FX 5800 had to fight its way through a limited market and become obsolete. Nvidia’s video made it much more timeless than any technical spec.
The video was a rare example of a major company having a sense of humor and acknowledging user feedback in a fun way. Can you imagine it made today?
