These days games cannot just be 'fast', they also have to look good. Image quality is a very subjective and opinionated point, so rather than us just talking about it, we've taken high resolution screen shots with FutureMarks 3DMark03's image quality tests.

With the Albatron GeForceFX 5200P in hand, we tested it image quality with 4xS and 8x AF enabled and compared that to a Radeon 9700 Pro with with 4x AA and 8x AF enabled. If you are on a 56k modem beware, these files are all about 500K in size!

The image comparisons below are animated GIF's. The Radeon 9700 Pro screen shot will be displayed first for 2 seconds before flipping over to the Albatron GFX5200P screen shot for another 2 seconds.

Yes I'm well aware that the Radeon 9700 Pro has higher AA and AF settings but with both cards set the same, the Radeon 9700 Pro's image still looks sharper. nVIDIA has gone a long way in their image quality but it's still not up to par with ATi's offering.

Overclocking:

We really didn't know what to expect from the little Albatron GeForceFX 5200P videocard. With it's small passive heatsink, we began to raise the core speed which is natively clocked at 250 MHz. Going up 10 MHz at a time, we easily passed 300 MHz and were pleasantly surprised when the card maxed out at 333 MHz.

Since the card was using 4ns Samsung DRAM which should easily do 500 MHz we were pretty excited on our chances with overclocking the memory. By default running at 400 MHz we increased the the memory frequency but ran into a whole load of problems. The highest we were able to reach with the memory was 410 MHz! If we tried anything higher, visual artifacts would start appearing on the desktop. Heat was not an issue with the memory, it was cool to the touch and to be honest, I'm not really sure what was holding us back. In any case, on with the benchmarks!!