As we looked at previously, PCI Express has
replaced AGP slots on basically all new Intel boards. While
an AGP slot can be added to any of the 9XX chipset based motherboards
it would be running at the PCI bus speed of 33MHz and be only
32 bits wide. This leaves a limit of 133MB/s to be used
by the card as well as other cards, unlike the 2.1GB/s that AGP
8X could handle. Thus the usefulness of 16X PCI Express
slots, which raises the theoretical bandwidth limit of the video
card to 4GB/s.
Both nVidia and ATi have PCI Express based
video cards among their other cards. The questions that
people have raised about these two companies PCI Express cards
is based on the approach that they took to make these cards.
ATi decided to create a fully PCI Express based card, while nVidia
decided to use a bridge chip to convert the AGP signals from the
video card into the PCI Express commands. Which one is better
is really up to debate, but since we don't have both companies
cards here we cannot say one way or the other.
Albatron has solely been an "nVidia Authorized
Solution Provider" for quite a while, so it makes perfect
sense that their first PCI Express cards would all be nVidia based.
The other older video cards that we have looked at previously
from Albatron have been fairly good, performing well for a decent
price. So can their latest card perform well, and do so
while not costing an arm and a leg? Lets see.
Albatron Trinity PCX5750
Albatron hasn't been the most generous in
providing bundles for its video cards, so have they changed with
the new card design? Lets look at a couple of pictures to
see the card.
Now for a list of what you
get:
- Video Card
- Manual
- SVHS to Composite adaptor
- Driver CD
- Duke Nukem: Manhatten Project
- Game CD
One of the first glaring omissions is that
there is no DVI to VGA adaptors included with this bundle, which
is very disappointing for any card that has a DVI port.
Most cards, and in fact almost all cards do come with this cheap
to supply, but somewhat more expensive to pick up piece, which
is very useful for anyone using dual displays.
Otherwise the software bundle is pretty decent,
with a driver CD and an older game in the form of Duke Nukem:
MP, and a CD with a few older games otherwise. Nothing that
most would pick up separately, but something included here, which
neither adds nor detracts from the rest of the package.
The manual is pretty good, as it seems that Albatron has a handle
on producing decent product manuals, which can never be overstated
at all.
Now on to the card itself, we can see from
the outputs on the card that it has a DVI port, a SVHS port and
the VGA port. This is a pretty standard configuration for
most cards and especially for those in the midrange of cards.
Moving on to the side of the card we see the heatsink which covers
the GPU, RAM, and the HSI bridge chip. Otherwise the side
of the card is pretty unimpressive, as there are no other things
that dominate the remaining space.
Now looking at the specific
parts of the card we see the HSI, which is the PCIe bridge
connector, to translate the commands from the AGP based 5700GPU
to the PCIe x16 slot and on to the computer. The chip
is an A2 revision of the chip which means that there wasn't
that much in the way of early problems with the chip (or so
we hope). Moving to the actual GPU we see the FX5750
chip in all its 'glory', all 82 million transistors worth.
It is using the standard flip chip so that the core can receive
direct cooling from the heatsink. The chip that is on
this card is based on A2 silicon and was made in the 17th
week of 2004.
The memory of this card is
the same as that seen in Hubert's review of the MSI PCX5750
card, the Samsung
K4D261638E-TC36 chips which are based on the older TSOP-II
design instead of the newer BGA design that GDDR memory uses.
The memory itself is specified to run at 275MHz (550MHz),
which is close to what this card is clocked at, giving us
a little room to play, hopefully.
The heatsink of this card
is bonded to the core by means of my least favorite option,
a thermal pad. The memory chips on the front of the
card are attached using a much thicker pad, as the memory
is lower height wise than the core. The heatsink connects
to the board via four push pins which are located around the
GPU and the HSI bridge. There is a standard video card
fan inside the heatsink which will help push 'cool' air over
the larger surface area of the heatsink. The backside
of the card is, well its bare, it has nothing to cool the
RAM on the back of the card. Thus the thermal pad on
the front RAM chips is more for show than any real cooling
effect. We will look at how well this heatsink cools
and how loud it is later on in the review.
NEXT
