Albatron made quite a name for themselves back in the GeForce4 era. Who could forget the awesome GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo line? Albatron has done what they set out to do, and have become a major player in the videocard industry within one generation. Now that the GeForceFX is upon us we were quite excited to discover what Albatron would potentially do with their videocards to make them stand out from the rest of the pack.

If we look back into history you'll remember that nVIDIA lost some Ti4600 sales to the GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU which offered great bang for the buck. It's a good bet that the same situation wasn't going to be allowed to develop for the new GeForceFX's!

The differences between budget/mainstream GeForceFX 5200/5600 GPU's and their more expensive brethern (FX5800/5900) is more then clock speed. Using less transistors (75 million for the FX5600 as oppose to 125 for the FX 5800 and 130 million for the 5900) nVIDIA is able to build a simplified core for a much lower price.

Still, that doesn't mean that the mainstream Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo will be a lower performer, and as you'll see shortly it does pretty well in the benchmarks. Heck, it's even quite a good overclocker!

albatron geforcefx 5600p turbo

Albatron pretty much follow the text book example of nVIDIA's GeForceFX 5600 reference design. Unlike most other GeForceFX 5600's (not GeForceFX 5600 Ultra's) the Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo has an additional molex power connector. The card will run just fine without the computer feeding the videocard with extra power, but under extreme loads the system may become unstable and reset.

The Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo comes with a fairly small software bundle which includes WinDVD, Motocross Mania and Serious Sam. Also included are a composite-to-composite cable, S-Video to Composite and a S-Video to S-Video cable. We would have liked to have had a DVI to analog converter bundled in with the videocard as well so people could take advantage of dual monitors.

As you can see Albatron uses their trademark copper GPU HSF which is as good as the third party GPU coolers on the market. Albatron also use some decent sized ramsinks on both the front and back of the videocard. We checked, and there actually is white silicon thermal compound between the DRAM and heatsinks! It's nice to see a manufacturer take pride in their products and show they are willing to take the extra steps when needed.

Unfortunately, we're not sure how much the Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo will retail for at this time. If history is any indication, the Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo will be priced a bit higher then most other FX 5600's.

One Small Quirk...

On a side note, we had a hard time getting the Albatron GeForceFX 5600P Turbo to work well with our Granite Bay/P4 2.8 GHz processor test system. The driver would install but we'd always get a "not enough resources" error in device manager. At first we thought that the card was defective, but we saw the exact same error with two other GeForceFX 5600 videocards from different manufacturers.

After some frustrating troubleshooting, we found that if DMA transfer mode on the HDD's was disabled the videocards would work flawlessly. With it enabled and the videocard simply refused to work properly.

Up next, the overclocking adventure you've been looking for.