When we removed the heatsink off the core we were greeted by a GeForceFX 5900 XT core. I was surprised our sample was labelled wrong, nVIDIA is usually more tidy than this.

As you are probably already aware, nVIDIA has implemented a form of clock throttling on their GPUs to prevent any instances of overheating. The down side to this technology is that it certainly make overclocking a much more difficult task.... Still, we pressed on to find out just how far the Albatron Trinity PC5900 would go.

With the core clocked at 350 MHz by default, I was hoping that the Trinity PC5900 would be able to at least reach GeForceFX 5900/5950 Ultra speeds. To find out, the first thing I did was boost the core speed to 400 MHz. The next boost pushed the core of the Trinity PC5900 to 450 MHz, and things were still running fine.... that is until I hit the "Test Settings" button. The system greeted me with a nice blue screen. I guess I should be a bit more gentle with my overclocking huh? ;-)

After dropping the speed back down it turned out that 418 MHz was the maximum stable speed we could run the core at. A bit disappointing, but then again when it comes to overclocking anything above stock speeds is a bonus.

The Trinity PC5900's Hynix 2.8ns memory is clocked at 550 MHz by default, so we inched up a few MHz at a time towards the 600 MHz mark. In the end, the memory capped off at 582 MHz. While this isn't the best we've seen, it isn't too bad.

We were also pleased to see that both the core and memory of the Albatron Trinity PC5900 played nicely together while overclocked. A couple other nVIDIA videocards we've tested in the past didn't like having both core and memory running while overclocked to the maximum frequency.

PCStats Test System Specs:

system 1 system 2 processor: intel pentium 4 540 intel pentium 4 3.0c clock speed: 16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz 15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz motherboards: gigabyte 8anxp-d, i925x gigabyte 8knxp, i875p videocard: gigabyte gv-rx60x128v gigabyte gv-nx57128d msi pcx5750-td128 albatron trinity pc5900 ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon 9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt msi fx5950 ultra-td128 msi fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 aopen geforcefx 5900xt memory: 2x 256mb crucial pc4300 ddr2 2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll hard drive: 40gb wd special ed 40gb wd special ed cdrom: msi x48 cd-rw/dvd-rom nec 52x cd-rom powersupply: vantec stealth 470w vantec stealth 470w software setup windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 forceware 60.85 windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 catalyst 3.9 detonator 53.03 benchmarks 3dmark2001se codecreatures aquamark aquamark3 gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se x2 the threat ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems are different, but the results are being included for reference.

3DMark2001SE	Source: FutureMark

By combining DirectX8 support with completely new graphics, it continues to provide good overall system benchmarks. 3DMark2001SE has been created in cooperation with the major 3D accelerator and processor manufacturers to provide a reliable set of diagnostic tools. The suite demonstrates 3D gaming performance by using real-world gaming technology to test a system's true performance abilities. Tests include: DirectX8 Vertex Shaders, Pixel Shaders and Point Sprites, DOT3 and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, support for Full Scene Anti-aliasing and Texture Compression and two game tests using Ipion real-time physics.