Overclocker Cafe - Albatron_GF_FX5200

Albatron GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

As you guys know by now, I'm a sucker for a good looking package (and yes I'm talking computer hardware here!). And Albatron has got me hook with the layout of the card. I love the blue PCB offset by the gold sink. Very slick looking.

And speaking of the heatsink, take a look at it and tell me it's not cool looking. The fan for the heatsink is plugged into the card itself via a small 2-pin plug just to the left of the sink. Taking a look under the hood is as easy as popping the retaining pins out and as you can see there's plenty of thermal grease for a good contact here.

But the GPU isn't the only thing on this card with a heatsink on it. To the right and above the GPU are the RAM modules and as you can see, Albatron slapped some wicked cool lookin sinks on those as well. This is the first card I've had that possessed factory RAM sinks. And while some will argue about whether or not RAM sinks actually do anything, Albatron included them anyway. Besides, they look cool.

The first pic above is of the sinks on the top of the card, but Albatron didn't stop there. Even on the bottom we've got some of these puppies as the second pic attests to. An yep, we've gonna pop the hood on these as well.

And sure enough, there's goo! Maybe not as much as we'd like, but it still shows attention to detail.

Let's take a quick look at the front and back of the card. As you can see the front is a pretty standard layout with the monitor plug in, DVI, and TV plugs. Turning the card around, we see that unlike the standard FX5200, the 5200 Ultra has a 4-pin Molex plug-in. Yeah baby....more power!

Ok, enough of the pictures. I mean the thing looks cool, but how does it perform, right? So here we are slapping the sucker in our test bed and running it up. But wait a sec.....I forgot one picture here. Something else I haven't seen before is on the driver disk. Sure Albatron included some basically outdated drivers with the card (but drivers are usually outdated within a couple of weeks anyway) but also on the disk is an overclocking tool! I guess that means we're gonna have to do that too huh?

Let's talk for a moment about how we're going to be testing the card. As I'm sure everyone out there has already read, there has been some big hub-bub going around about 3DMark 2003 testing. And several sites have since thrown out using 3DMark2003 as a test for VGA cards. Well, I've decided to include it in this one for several reasons. Number one, is that while it's true that synthetic benchmarks are not very accurate in and of themselves, I'm not relying solely on 3DMark for our testing. The bulk of our testing will be done using gaming benchmarks which will show you the frames per second the card is running. Secondly, I'll be using 3DMark 2001 and 2003 as more of a comparison to each other than as a score in and of themselves. But the biggest reason for doing it is just because I like watching the demos run through, so why not?

Anti-Aliasing

I don't usually do any anti-aliasing in my testing of video cards, mainly because I try and keep these reviews short and to the point as much as possible, but with the lack of support for Z-compression in the NV34 chip, I'm going to run several of the benches with AA enabled. Without support for Z-compression the anti-aliasing should really take a hard hit.

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