Albatron Trinity PC5900 PCI Express Videocard Review
With high
end PCI Express videocards in short supply, those of you looking for the best
performance may want to cast an eye towards nVIDIA's GeForcePCX 5900 series.
Priced near the top of the mainstream scale, the GeForcePCX 5900
offers gamers a lot more punch, for just a little more money. The
GeForcePCX 5900 is not simply a stop gap solution till higher end cards become available, it's a quick GPU! The PCX 5900 core
itself is architecturally identical to its AGP counterpart, the GeForceFX 5900, but nVIDIA engineers have
placed a HSI (High Speed Interconnect) chip between the GPU and PCI Express which
allows them to communicate together.
In this review
we'll see the part of the GPU being played by nVIDIA's GeForcePCX
5900. The videocard in question is the Albatron Trinity PC5900, which is
obviously based on the GeForcePCX 5900 GPU.
The Trinity
PC5900
videocard is powered with 128MB of DDR RAM, and supports both analog
and DVI monitors. There is also an S-Video out. Albatron includes everything you'll
need to connect your PC to the TV, but it seems they forgot the DVI to
analog converter for those of you who want to use dual analog monitors. In terms
of software, the Trinity PC5900 card comes with WinDVD/WinDVD Creator, Duke Nukem: MP
and a five game demo CD.
Albatron's colour is blue, and their products all sport the same shade of
royal blue. The layout of the Trinity PC5900 is a little different
from usual, and as you can see, it is also pretty long at 21.5 cm
in length.
In our tests, we found that we had
have to remove the Trinity PC5900 videocard from the test board (a Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D
motherboard) every time
we needed to access the floppy drive connector. Not a big deal really,
but depending on your motherboard's layout, you may find a card
of this length obscures IDE or FDD connectors. Best to blame this one on nVIDIA's PCX5900
reference design.
You probably notice
the absence of any external power connector, with the core only
clocked at 350 MHz and memory at 550 MHz, it doesn't need the extra
power supply.
The
software package included along with the Albatron Trinity PC5900 is a
little thing, but I guess you can't ask for much considering it's one of
the most affordable GeForcePCX 5900 cards on the market right now. Plus, with
the money you save, you can buy yourself a copy of Doom 3!
Noise is
an issue many manufacturers are trying to do away with, and in this respect the
Albatron Trinity PC5900 fares nicely. It is extremely quiet during operation, thanks to its
cooling solution which also keeps temperatures under control. In our tests, the Trinity PC5900 did
get pretty hot during the benchmarks, and considering how much heat the other system
components generate on an i925X or i915P motherboard, I'd recommend beefing
up that case airflow.