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Albatron GeForce 6600 - 512 The Card Looking at the Albatron 6600 - 512 we find the familiar blue PCB board that is synonymous with Albatron. An oversized orange aluminum cooler breaks things up with a nice aesthetic contrast. Surprisingly, when we flipped the card over we found no memory chips. My first impression was a card with 512 megs of memory would have it packed in all over not on only one side. This isn't a con in the least, just unexpected.
Looking closer at the top side of the card, it looks as if all the memory is on one side to keep it cooler. The memory chips do not have their own heatsinks so their placement seems smartly done so they can benefit from the GPU's fan. The memory chips placed on the outer edge unfortunately don't get the same direct flow as the others. Remember you are only as fast as your weakest link. From a side view, its nice to see that the Albatron 6600 - 512 is a single slot solution. I've gotten to really not like VGA coolers that take up a slot or two because of sheer bulk.
Here is a better shot of the air flow hitting some but not all of the memory chips I mentioned before. Four M-RAM modules are lined up above and to the right of the GPU. The DDR2 memory's observed clock frequency was 500MHz, which was surprising since the Albatron site reports it as being clocked at 533MHz. I'm not sure if this is a misprint on Albatron's site or a last minute change to the card itself. Either way, without any RAM sinks I don't expect to see much of an overclock here but we'll have to wait and see.
Let me introduce you to the NVidia GeForce 6600 GPU. Albatron reports the core frequency as being 350MHz, however our test unit had a core speed of 325MHz. Considering the core and the memory speed differences between the manufacturer specs and our bench, I believe it's safe to assume that backing off on their respective frequencies was a last minute change to the series and not an oversight. Lots of spooge here. Albatron may have cut back on the bundle but they certainly didn't skimp on the thermal paste. Is Graham working at Albatron now?
Our final physical shot of the card is of its outputs. VGA, DVI and S-Video out give options for most any monitor you have now or will have in the immediate future.
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