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Albatron GeForce 7800 GTX The Card The Albatron 7800 GTX is rather plain looking with a minimal design in the cooler's plastic top. No fancy silent of triple fan cooler here... at least not yet. Albatron has a rich history of building on reference designs and my thoughts are that the we should see a special edition version or a reworked cooler on future models. Time will tell.
The length wise picture you see below gives you a better point of reference for the card's size. Measuring a good 230mm long, the card is not what I'd call compact. A Dual DVI with S-Video interface keep the dual monitor and TV crowd happy. You have a DVI-VGA adapter included for the 95% of us still having a monitor with a standard VGA connector. The cooler is centered around a 50mm fan. The fan's operation is virtually silent and operates very efficiently due to the channeling of the air flow. Remember your physics 101; focused flow equals higher velocity which is just as effective as a high volume larger fan.
Flipping the Albatron 7800 GTX over, we see that the cooler's mounting plates act as heatsinks for the memory on the back side of the card. While I still would like to see video card makers produce something with airflow on the underside of a card, our IR thermometer never recorded temperatures over 68 degrees Celsius which is on par with what we've seen on other VGA cards.
Stripping back to cooler's cover we get a better look at the thin gauge aluminum convection fins of the heatsink itself. Removal of the cooler body shows us that Albatron uses thermal interface pads to ensure proper cooling at the necessary contact points. The pads looked a bit worn and on reassembly we opted to put generic thermal paste in place of the TIMs. (Our test unit was a loaner sample.) As a quick but necessary aside, all testing was done prior to disassembly of the card to ensure our results were accurate with the stock interface material in place.
The base showed itself to be reasonably smooth with no overt imperfections. Very close to a 'shaver' finish. Certainly no want of a lap job here.
Below you can get a look at the 7800 GTX's core. Rated at 430MHz, plenty of muscle is available to move NVidia's new architecture. Albatron has gone with Samsung GDDR3 memory with their 7800 GTX. The Samsung chips are rated at 600MHz (1200MHz DDR). From a standpoint of overclocking headroom, we may not have a lot of reach with the memory but at a 1200MHz clock who can complain?
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