Founded in August of 1986, MSI is the number 1 supplier of video cards in the world for the past two years. With revenues exceeding $10 billion USD, and shipments reaching several million video cards a year, MSI outpaces Asus, Gigabyte and other vendors by a good margin. Over the years MSI has produced exclusively Nvidia based cards, but this may change in the very near future.

Nvidia has been in a interesting position lately that they haven't been in since 3dfx went bankrupt. They're in second place in terms of high-end performance and interestingly enough it's taken them a good year for them to catch up to ATI in performance. In some respects, one could say they haven't caught all the way up with ATI. Hopefully with the next round of video cards, NVIDIA and ATI will compete.

Nvidia announced the 5700 Ultra in November of 2003. Placed in the mid-range (under $200) marketplace, the 5700 Ultra replaces the aborted 5600 Ultra series. Truthfully the 5600 Ultra never lived up to it's billing, as performance wise it just didn't give much of an advantage over the previous generation card, the Ti4200, and no advantage over it's competition, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro.

MSI has always been about quality video cards, mostly with chips made by Nvidia (they've built some OEM ATI cards for Medion) Amazingly, over the years I've only had the pleasure of using two MSI cards, a Ti4200 8x from last year and now the 5700 Ultra from MSI. So let's see what the MSI 5700 Ultra has to offer.