|
|
A
hardware tech site for the rest of us.
 |
|||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||
|
Albatron GeForce FX 5700P Turbo The card The familiar blue PCB adorned with gold heatsinks get your attention right off the bat. The 5700P Turbo separates the GPU cooling and RAM cooling unlike some of the 5700 Ultra versions we have seen with the large sink that covers effectively half of the card as you can see here. I prefer the independent RAM / GPU cooling method to the large card covering sink, not only because of the weight savings but you also get the latitude to install aftermarket RAM sinks without having to change the GPU cooler if you so choose.
From an end view, we see a standard VGA, S-Video and a DVI port. Most folks will never use the DVI or S-Video but it is nice to know you have these if you find you need or want them down the road.
Taking a look at the GPU cooler itself we see the intake fan on top that pulls air in which is then directed out two sides so that it blows over top the RAM sinks. The GPU cooler is not a fancy LED number but it is quiet which is more than can be said for some GPU coolers out there.
Removing the cooler, we exposed the FX5700 core. Clocked at 425MHz, the 5700P Turbo lags behind the 5700 Ultra's 475MHz GPU clock speed. Thermal paste was used as an interface material and the lap job on the cooler was acceptable but not exceptional. Next to the pic of the core we see one of the eight RAM modules on the FX5700P Turbo. Albatron is using the Hynix memory as you can see. These modules are rated at 2.8ns which translates to 700MHz DDR. Keep in mind that the memory is clocked at 650MHz from the factory so I'm expecting to see a nice overclock with this Albatron card.
Performance It has been a while since our last graphics card review here at the OCC. You may remember we got into a spat with FutureMark some time back. Since then, we have tried to focus our testing on games the average Joe plays as much as possible opposed to the synthetic benchmarks in a can. Kyle from the Hard|OCP has really led this charge to call a spade a spade with the synthetic benchmarks because of the "driver optimization" aka cheating that has plagued our community. My attitude toward "driver optimization" is if a driver is tweaked to give better than usual performance in one or another specific games; fine, just so long as that is a game I play and the driver optimization benefits my game play rather than a company's bottom line. To give you an snapshot of the performance of the Albatron FX5700P Turbo and the differences it has with its $40 higher priced Ultra cousin. The comparison card we used was a Inno3D 5700 Ultra. We ran the two side by side in our benchmarking suite. This will include UT2003 using the Hard|OCP's benchmarking program, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Quake 3 Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Code Creatures and AquaMark v3. Five runs per bench were taken with the highest and lowest scores being thrown out. The remaining three were then averaged and that is what you see here. The most current NEDs available at the time of this writing, v56.72 were used for all tests. Page 1 - Introduction |
|
|
All rights reserved. All
pages Copyright © 2000 - 2008 by R. Dean Barker.
|
