Albatron use a fair sized copper HSF for the GPU, and I think it does a pretty good job at keeping the core cool. Thankfully, the fan on the heatsink is very quiet so you're not going to notice it while you're fragging away. Albatron cool the Hynix memory with large RAMsinks on the front of the videocard and smaller ones on the rear of the videocard. The memory didn't seem to generate all that much heat during testing.

As you can see from the picture on the left, the Albatron FX5600U uses the new and improved GeForceFX 5600 Ultra core. With the new core, the NV31 is now using the same FCBGA packaging as the more expensive NV35 (FX5900). nVIDIA have even incorporated a small copper heat spreader to protect the core from damage.

With the new core nVIDIA finally integrated a thermal diode so users can monitor its' temperature. The NV31 is a fairly cooling running, and during testing it would idle at around 28 degrees. Under full load that number rose close to 50 degrees Celsius. Much cooler than the 100+ degrees that the NV35 core of the GeForceFX 5900/5900 Ultra's ran at!

The new GeForceFX 5600 Ultra's already run faster than their older counter parts (400 MHz core vs 350 MHz for the original), and with the new features we were hoping for some nice numbers.

Starting at 400 MHz we proceeded to raise the core speed slowly, a few MHz at a time. With the default cooler on GeForceFX 5600 Ultra GPU we hit a maximum speed of 440 MHz. Anything higher and the image would start tearing in the various benchmarks.

We were expecting some good numbers from the core as it uses Hynix HY5DU283222 2.5ns BGA DRAM which is clocked at 800 MHz by default.

It seems as though this Hynix memory does not like to be overclocked as we hit our maximum speed at a lowly 825 MHz. Hopefully retail Albatron GeForceFX 5600 Ultra's will overclock a bit better than the unit we received for review.