Albatron FX5900XTV Videocard Review
When you look back at it, it's amazing how far Albatron has come in
such a short time. True, the company has technically been around since 1984 under the name
MonoVision, and "Albatron" only came about after the then CEO of Gigabyte left
to build a new company. With an Albatross as their icon, Albatron have
been manufacturing motherboards and videocards since the 2002, quickly earning a good
name for themselves amongst computer enthusiasts and general users alike.
With the dawn of the PCI-Express videocard very quickly approaching, there has been much
movement in graphics cards circles to end on a high note.
The best example of this is the GeForceFX 5900XT GPU, which comes to us from Albatron
in the form of the FX5900XTV video card.
Mirroring
many other FX5900XT implementations, the Albatron
FX5900XTV comes backed by 128MB of DDR RAM. It supports VIVO thanks to the
Philips SAA7114H chipset, and comes with the traditional VIVO break out box
and S-Video cable so you can hook your PC up to
a television. Along with the 8XAGP card is an assortment of software
- PowerDirector, PowerDVD, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project and a five
game demo CD - a Composite cable, and DVI-to-analog
converter.
The Albatron FX5900XTV is based on the standard nVIDIA FX5900 PCB reference design, albeit
with a custom copper heatsink and classy blue colour. The copper-based heatsink runs nice
and quiet; probably one of
the quietest we've heard in fact. The tiny BGA DDR chips are
passively cooled with some extruded aluminum heatsinks which are attached with a little frag
tape.
As you browse through the
computer shops you've probably notice that most videocards come bundled with a TV-Out or VIVO connector, but only
a few tend to come bundled with all the necessary cables connectors to take full advantage of these handy features.
Overclocking Results
Even at stock
speeds the Albatron FX5900XTV is a pretty fast videocard... but who this day ever settles for stock speeds?
;-)
As we
began the core overclocking, we were surprised to find the Albatron FX5900XTV's core was
clocked at 390 MHz, not the 400 MHz of the MSI
FX5900XT-VTD128!
Starting
at 390 MHz we immediately raised the core speed to 450
MHz, the same speed the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra is clocked at. Not surprisingly the FX5900XTV had
no problems running at that speed. Next up was 475 MHz, or GeForceFX 5950
Ultra core speed. The Albatron FX5900XTV didn't quite have enough to run at
that speed though... it would pause momentarily while the benchmarks were being run, indicating it was
a little out of its element. In the end we settled for a very
nice core speed of 468 MHz.
Next up are the memory overclocking tests, and since the DDR is clocked at 700 MHz,
we inched up a few MHz at a time to start with. The FX5900XTV passed 720....
730....740MHz quite easily, before maxing out at 780 MHz. Definitely not bad for mainstream
videocard!
Once we
know how high the core and memory will go individually, we try to run them overclocked together. Usually, the core or the memory will
have to be lowered to get the card into a comfortably
overclocked area. Like most GeForceFX-class videocards we've tested the FX5900XTV would not stably
run with both core and memory overclocked to their max. However, once we
lowered the memory speed from 780 to 768 MHz everything went smoothly.
![](https://www.pcstats.com/i/newsletter_su_top_tab.gif) |
PCStats Test System Specs: |
processor: |
intel pentium 4 3.0c |
clock
speed: |
15 x 200 mhz = 3.0 ghz |
motherboards: |
gigabyte 8knxp, i875p |
videocard: |
ati radeon 9800xt ati radeon 9800 pro ati radeon
9700 pro asus radeon 9600xt msi fx5950 ultra-vtd256 msi
fx5900u-vtd256 msi fx5900xt-vtd128 gigabyte
gv-nv57u128d msi fx5900xt-vtd128 albatron fx5900xtv |
memory: |
2x 256mb corsair twinx 3200ll |
hard drive:
|
40gb wd special ed |
cdrom: |
nec 52x cd-rom |
powersupply: |
vantec stealth 470w |
software setup
|
windowsxp build 2600 intel inf 5.02.1012 catalyst
3.9 detonator 53.03 |
workstation
benchmarks |
3dmark2001se codecreatures aquamark aquamark3 gun
metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003
aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se
x2 the
threat ut2003 | |