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Albatron Trinity PCX5750 Albatron Trinity PCX5750: While not the fastest kid on the block, the PCX5750 offers adequate mainstream performance at a low price.
Date: October 25, 2004
Manufacturer:
Written By:

Drivers

    ATi recently released their new Catalyst Control panel software, though previously nVidia also released some improvements to its Forceware drivers.  So lets take a quick walk through the 61.77 drivers.

    First we will take a look at the overall setup of the drivers.  This is nothing that is particularly new in the layout of the drivers.  nVidia has used the main window to provide the data for the selected option on the left panel.  The left panel gives you all the different sections for each option, with about seven different option boxes to change different monitor options from Color correction, to adjustment, to refresh rate override.  The Clock frequencies tab is only available when you run the Coolbits registry file.

    Next is the Performance & Quality menu which is where most of the tweaking will occur for this card.  Here is where nVidia has changed the layout somewhat compared to the multiple menus of some of the much older versions.  Here you can change the AA, the ansiotropic filtering as well as some quality settings.  The settings you see there are the ones that we used for the AA tests on the card. 

Overclocking

    Now lets take a look at the overclocking ability of this video card.  The obvious reminder is that this is a sample of one video card, so your results may vary.  However the FX5750 is made on a very mature 0.13µ process, so overclocking headroom should be good.  The RAM isn't rated much higher than the stock speeds, but still should provide at least some overclocking headroom.  So lets see the results we had.

    From the stock speeds of 425/500 (Core/Memory) we see a very nice overclock.  The core increases by 83MHz or about 20%, which is more than the standard ~10% increase that most see out of their video cards.  The memory increases by 35% over its stock clock speed, while it also overclocks 22% higher than its rated speed.  Overall a very nice theoretical improvement in both core and memory speeds, but does this translate into any noticeable reallife results?  We will see in our test results.

    Sound levels are something that many don't think about until they try to quiet their computer down and the only remaining sound is found with their video card.  So what kind of sound levels does this card produce with its fan.

Video Card

MSI FX5900U - VTD (Front Fan) MSI FX5900U - VTD (Both Fans) Matrox Parhelia ATi Radeon 9800XT Albatron Trinity PCX5750

Sound Level (dBA):

51/56 (L/H) 55/63 (L/H) 61 50/64 66

    We can see that the Albatron video card is not exactly quiet, in fact its the loudest card that we tested here.  At 66 dBA from the 2" distance this is loud, though the CPU cooler and other fans inside your system will drown out your video card fan. 

Quality Tests

    First we will look at the 2D quality of the video card.  This is one of if not the most important aspect of the video card, though many people do not take the time to look closely at the quality of display that they are constantly looking at.  So lets take a look at how well the FX5750 does with 2D quality.  The test is the same as we've been using for a while, with the reference display being a Matrox G400 video card attached to a 21" Dell badged Trinitron monitor.  The screen resolution was 1600*1200, with a color depth of 32bpp and a refresh rate of 85Hz.  So lets see how it did in comparison.

Test Matrox G400 Matrox Parhelia ATi Radeon 9800XT MSI FX5900U Intel 915G IGP Albatron FX5750
Black Text / White Back: 5 7.5 7 6 4.5 5.5
White Text / Black Back: 5 8 7.25 7 5 7
Bitmap Test: 5 9 8.5 7 6 6.5
Overall Rating 5 8.25 7.5 6.5 5.25 6.25

    We can see that the two video cards we looked at here are almost a step back in terms of 2D quality.  The onboard video of the 915G is particularly weak at text with your standard text turning out to be about as bad as the worst card I've looked at.  The graphics are better for the onboard video but are still washed out by comparison to the better cards.  The FX 5750 by comparison is much better, but this still doesn't put it in the same class as the best cards, though it is very close in some cases.  This is especially true in the white text on black background where it basically is as good as all but the Parhelia.  The image test is like the 915G, being washed out, but in this case it is not as bad as the other card.

TV Out is becoming a major piece that video card manufacturers are putting into their video cards, as people are using their computer for displaying their movies and games onto their 'big' screen TV's.  Our test uses two computers, one that contains a TV Tuner in this case the 5750 uses the AiW 9600 while the rest are using the ATi AiW 9000 though I haven't really noticed much, if any difference between the two cards.  However we also have a reference image from the DVD that we used to test, that of the movie "Chicken Run", a claymation movie with plenty of vibrant colors and contrasts.  All tests were output using a SVHS cable, so lets see the results.

 

Reference Image

Matrox Parhelia

ATi Radeon 9800XT

MSI FX5900U

Albatron PCX5750

    So what does this picture show?  Lets first take a look at the text of the cards.  The Albatron card does antialias the text quite a bit in comparison to the reference image, in fact its a little too much for my tastes, bordering on the blurry.  Otherwise the card slightly squishes the text horizontally by a small amount.  As for the image quality of the output we see that there are points where there is a slight bit of blur and a higher brightness on the picture which isn't really desirable in this case.  The overall picture is cut slightly on the horizontal, but not enough to distort the image greatly.  The text for the 9800XT is sharper and has very little of the checkered pattern that the AiW 9000Pro had.  For the rest of the image it is blurry but is smoother than that of the AiW 9000Pro.  The TV out of the FX5900 Ultra suffers from a distorted image, that has a border on either side of the picture, and a fuzzy picture.  There also seems to be a pronounced checker pattern on solid colors and also on the text, something we don't see with some of the other cards notably the Parhelia.  While the text on the reference image is sharp and aliased, the Parhelia does a good job of antialiasing the text, while not overdoing it.

    3D quality is the last quality test we will look at.  All video cards offer some form of antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering, from the 16X Ansio of the ATi cards, to the 8X AA of the nVidia based cards and even the 16X FAA of the Matrox video card.  So lets see how each video card looks in our testing.

Video Card/Settings

AA Test Area Ansiotropic Filtering Area
ATi Radeon 9800XT - 6X AA / 16X Ansio
Matrox Parhelia - No AA / Ansio
Matrox Parhelia - 16X FAA / 2X Ansio
MSI FX 5900 Ultra - No AA / Ansio
MSI FX 5900 Ultra - 8X AA / 8X Ansio
Albatron PCX5750 - No AA / Ansio
Albatron PCX5750 - 8X AA / 8X Ansio
Intel 915G IGP - No AA / Ansio

    Looking first at the AA test we see that there is very little difference between the three cards without AA enabled.  With the various levels of AA enabled (16,8,4) we see that the Parhelia comes out on top but only by a slim margin.  If you look at the landscape in the background on the 5900 Ultra and PCX5750 and the Parhelia, you can notice that the Parhelia has just a smoother image.  The Radeon 9000 is in last place in this test with its maximum of 4X AA.  The 6X AA is pretty nice, looking better on more horizontal lines (horizon) than the 8X of the 5900U but worse with a more vertical line (rooftop).   

    Moving to the ansiotropic filtering of the cards, with it disabled the Parhelia has better filtering.  You can notice that the ground seems 'bumpier' on the Parhelia without ansiotropic filtering even enabled, otherwise all of the other cards look very similar.  With ansiotropic filtering enabled, we see that in this part of the image the Radeon 9000 doesn't really do much if any filtering, due to its adaptive design.  The Parhelia's 2X ansio looks slightly better than its trilinear filtering.  The Radeon 9800XT has extremely good ansiotropic filtering as at 16X it is much better than any of the others we have tested so far.  I am also impressed by the 8X ansiotropic filtering of the Albatron card, though it is still not quite the same quality as the ATi cards with 16X. 

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