Overclocking

From the very beginning I wasn't sure how well the Albatron PC6600GT would overclock. We have copper 'sinks on both the memory and the core which bodes well, but at 500MHz and 1.01GHz it is running quite fast to begin with. However temperatures looked good (the core rarely goes over 52C under load at stock speeds) and we have 2ns GDDR3 onboard so we entered the coolbits information into the registry and proceeded to ramp up the speeds. The best combined overclock we could manage was 1.14GHz on the memory, a rise of 130MHz and an extra 71MHz on the Core for a 571MHz clock. To test how this effected performance, we run some timedemo benchmarks using 'Benchemall!' on both Doom 3 and Half Life 2 at 1024x768, No AA, No AF.

Final Words

Albatron's PC6600GT is a very nice card indeed. We don't have much of a difference from the reference design, but then it isn't really needed. The blue PCB makes a nice change from the usual green and reds we see from other manufacturers and the use of copper ‘sinks worked well for overclocking (despite the little gain in actual gaming performance).

Doom 3, despite this being a midrange card with only 128MB of memory, ran nicely, even allowing for 1280x1024 play if you can do without anti-aliasing (which is Doom 3's dark visuals isn't as important). If you want anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, again the Albatron PC6600GT doesn't disappoint providing you drop down to 1024x768 resolution, arguably the most commonly used gaming resolution.

Half Life 2 performance ran a lot better than I expected for a midrange card, and with some great visuals to boot.

Far Cry, UT2K4 and NFS:U2 ran great on the Albatron PC6600GT, especially in comparison with the X600XT card, providing almost twice the performance which is quite a jump.

For a mid range card with 128mb, I was expecting Doom 3 and Far Cry to require an 800x600 resolution for acceptable frame rates, but this wasn't the case; all the games tested ran at 1024x768 with some FSAA and AF without issue, and in some cases a few even broke into playable at 1280x1024 (albeit without FSAA or AF).

Image quality is typically an area that ATI cards have come out on top in since way back, but for 3D I have to say I found it very hard to tell the difference. In the case of Doom 3 I preferred the slightly sharper image from the Albatron PC6600GT over the X600XT. 2D quality was by no means bad in any way, but I did find that the X600XT has the edge here; text was more defined.

The overall package for the Albatron PC6600GT is quite minimal but this isn't a terrible loss as most extra's packaged with cards are never that outstanding anyway. At around the $210 mark, this puts it in the lower end of the price range, so if you are looking for a decent 6600GT PCIe with SLI capabilities and HDTV Encoding, but without wanting to pay for extra's you won't use, then you should take a good look at the Albatron Trinity PC6600GT.

Pros: Great price/performance ratio, Good looking card with blue PCB, copper 'sinks, Overclocking went well (albeit with little performance increase), SLI capable, HDTV output, 2ns GDDR3, doesn't require any extra power.

Cons: None really, minimalist extra's with the whole package maybe, but this is reflected in the price.

Bottom Line: I like the Albatron Trinity PC6600GT a lot; it plays modern games very well (and will do so better if you grab a second for SLI), has great image quality, isn't too loud and looks good in your case to boot.

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