Conclusion
It is fascinating to see what pains must be taken to send the display data safely from the graphics cards to the display in digital form. The amount of data sent to the display over a DVI connection in a single day is gargantuan. Over a year, around 51,088,320 gigabytes of data are transferred via DVI at UXGA resolution - that is, if the display were on 24/7 of course. To put this in perspective, that makes 51.088320 petaBytes, while 25,5442 hard disks of 200 GB each would be needed to store this humongous amount of data.
The result of our DVI compliance test is positive across the board, with all six cards reaching DVI compliance. However, while the three ATI based cards provided by ABIT and ATi turned in exemplary results, MSI's NVIDIA based cards are only able to reach DVI compliance in UXGA at a reduced frequency of 141 MHz and using a reduced blanking interval. This greatly limits the NVIDIA cards' "upward mobility" - since they don't have enough reserves for TFT displays with higher native resolutions than UXGA (1600x1200). The MSI NX6800 card only reached compliance at 162 MHz when a separate TMDS transmitter chip was used. Counting these results, it seems that ATi's integrated TMDS transmitter is superior to NVIDIA's implementation. Yet the MSI cards' eye diagrams displayed a turbulent distribution of the data even when the SiL 164 TMDS transmitter was used. This, in turn, limits the maximum usable cable length, especially when cheaper cables are used.
We will continue to conduct DVI compliance tests of random samples of graphics cards in the future as well. We expect that the lower price segment has some unpleasant surprises waiting to be discovered.
