People are saying there is physically no difference between the 5900 & 5950U...

[Spyda]

Well there is! and its totally obvious, I had a 400/800 5900 about a week ago, but took it back as I found a 5950U for the same price. In the time I had the 5900, I put it through its paces, i was mean to it, getting 520/996 out of it before it artefacted into submission.

This overclocked card gave me scores of 22,089 in aquamark, 15,873 in 3DMark2001SE and 6041 in 3DMark03,(I did manage a little more in 03 but i feared for the cards wellbeing, seeing as i couldnt see much of the tests being done due to rips and tears.

Then came the 5950U, clocked at the standard 475/950 this card managed 36,864 in aquamark, 17,129 in 3DMark2001SE and 6377 in 3DMark03. I havent even installed the registry tweak to unlock the extra settings on this card yet, as it is wiping the floor with all contenders.

All over the internet i have read about people updating the BIOS on the 5900 to get a 5950U, saying they are the exact same card and chip, just higher clocked, if this is true, the 5900 overclocked should have got a noticably higher score in every benchmark than the 5950U did at default.

These tests were done both on a clean install of windows with only the benchmarks installed using the same gfx drivers and system speeds.

[DragonNOA1]

I've read a little about this. It seems like they are very similar. Overclock your card a little and add the new BIOS and you have a new card! It's kinda cool. While they are very close, I'm sure there are little differences (hardware wise) that amount to a higher score for the 5950U. They are "practically" the same tho.

[Spyda]

they use the same bare chips, but the revisions are very different, so much so that each revision does not recognise each other

[Rof_lmao]

how do u get new bios?

[Spyda]

you can actually get the leadtek 5950U BIOS, (I have the leadtek 5950Ultra 256MB) off the leadtek website, a bit ago they actually had a notice saying for extreme overclocking and performance gains of your 5900 install this bios, and it is the standard 5950U bios. And as the nvidia cards re recognise all hardware every time the computer is restarted (unlike ATi cards which do exactly what the bios says, even if it is wrong) you can even flash a vanillla 128MB 400/700 5900 to a 5950Ultra, albeit a 5950U with 128MB and no VIVO, oh yea, thats another thing, a lot of people lost the VIVO function when using the 5950U bios