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Albatron GeForce FX 5950 Ultra Most of us have seen the reference designs for the FX 5950 cards. These have an ABIT type looking OTES cooler that blows air over the GPU and out of the case. While exceptionally trick looking they are generally noisy and take up two rear expansion slots when installed. The Albatron card sports what they call their Wise Fan Technology to keep the GF5950UV cool. What this entails is three fans mounted on to a copper/aluminum oversized heatsink. The two fans closest to the front of the card are always on. Should the internal temperature sensor detect that the GPU's temperature exceed 56 degrees Celsius, the third fan kicks in. Each fan operates at 25 decibels, so keeping the third fan off unless needed guarantees the card will operate within its design limits while keeping noise to a minimum. Albatron cites other cards that use the reference design's cooling method run at over 40 decibels. You do the math, 25 decibels or 40 decibels. Also, if either of the primary fans fail, the third fan kicks in automatically. The small slits cut into the cooler shroud you see below are billed as "noise reduction wind vents." I can't comment on if they live up to their name in and of themselves but I can say this card runs VERY quiet.
The front bracket shows us the 5950 UV's DVI out and S-Video out that come along with the standard VGA out port. Looking at the front are rear of the card from the angles below give you a much better idea how big that sink really it. While large, its copper AND aluminum construction kept the weight down to 499 grams which isn't a lot given the size of this thing.
Along the rear of the card we also find the four pin Molex power connector. Plugging in here requires you bear down pushing IN to the PCB as opposed to pushing ALONG the PCB. We noted in our Radeon 9800 XT review that the connector on that specific card felt flimsy. This most definitely was not the case here. Kudos to Albatron for attention to detail here in making one solidly mounted plug.
Time for one of my favorite things; taking stuff apart. The Wise Fan set up is held on by push pin type holders that are easily removed. On the reverse side of the card a small bar of sorts acts as a pressure clip to keep the back plate on nice and snug. Oops. Did I forget to mention the Wise Fan sports a back plate for the memory on the reverse side. You just can't very well stick 256 megs on DDR on one side of a VGA card you know.
Once both cooling plates were removed we were able to admire a reasonable but not exceptionally clean lap job on the memory and core contact points. I can tell you that the memory and core were all 100% in contact with the cooling plates. This was a problem with our 9800 XT as you may recall. The small standoff in the pic below and to the right, comes in contact with the PCB on the back side of the core if you are curious.
Here we see the exposed NV35 core and memory. Silicone thermal paste was used at the factory as an interface material which was applied there liberally. Much more paste here and I would have thought Graham was moonlighting again.
Here is a close up shot of one of the sixteen 16 mb Hynix 2ns DDR memory modules Albatron has selected to help power the 5950 UV.
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