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Albatron PCX5750 Trinity


Date
: 09/9/04 – 10:58:01 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer:
Albatron

Price:
NA

We last looked at Albatron's PX915P Pro motherboard which offered an affordable entry point into the Intel LGA 775 platform. Unfortunately, while the motherboard may be affordable there are other expenses that may need to be made with this jump. These other expenses can include both processor and video card. I say 'can' because there are AGP/PCI Express and 478/775 hybrid boards out there or going to be out there soon, but the majority of boards will not offer such capabilities.

Today we take our promised look at the
Albatron PCX5750 Trinity
video card which uses the PCI Express bus. This serial bus is a replacement for the aging parallel AGP bus and offers both end-user and manufacturer benefits that were discussed here. Hopefully everyone's now up to speed, so let's get started.

Page 2 : Package

The PCX5750 Trinity's packaging features styling similar to that of the PX915P Pro's we looked at last week. The box is holographic and clearly lists IO connectivity, the graphics processor name, and the graphics interface. Nothing special, it's only a box.

Inside that box are a manual, a few compact disks, an S-Video to RCA/composite adapter, and finally the PCX5750 itself. The manual is actually quite thick, but mostly because it covers more than just the PCX series of graphics cards as well as in four different languages.

The game bundle of the PCX5750 is nothing amazing. Included is a full version of Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project and a 'Game Pack'. The Game Pack is simply a collection of demos; most of which are older games such as Max Payne. The driver disk includes WHQL Certified Detonator (now called Forceware) versions 60.85, 56.56, 53.03, 52.16, 52.14, and 45.23. Also of use on the disk is a registry entry that can used to add the Coolbits registry modification for overclocking.

Below we have the card itself. The heatsink is large and covers the GPU, AGP-to-PCI Express bridge chip, and the front memory chips. The fan is positioned above where the GPU sits in order to improve heat disappation from the core; now a common practice.

The rear of the card has no heatsink and thus the memory chips are bare. This could negatively effect our overclocking endeavors.

With the heatsink removed and the thermal gum removed you can see the GeForce 5700 core and the bridge chip below it.

The PCX5750 has D-Sub, DVI, and S-Video outputs. It would be preferred to have dual DVI with a D-Sub adapter, but this hasn't become mainstream yet and has only recently become a featured on some of the latest generation of graphics processors.

The memory on this particular card, and different from samples reviewed mid-August by other sites (Hynix 4 ns, 500 MHz chips), are 3.6 ns Samsung chips rated at 555.56 MHz. The card ships with the memory clocked at 500 MHz so we should see a fair bit of gain on these later.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following specifications were provided by Albatron for the PCX5750 Trinity:

Page 4 : Features

The GeForce FX family of GPUs feature the following:

The PCX5750 is the typical GeForce FX 5700 GPU married to an AGP-to-PCI Express bridge. All the features remain the same and all the limitations remain the same. The only thing different is the interface to the system. It has already been shown that these early days of PCI Express will show little advantage in performance over the AGP bus, but in time that should change with more software and hardware adoption taking place. One thing we're pretty excited about around here is nVidia's SLI technology made possible by PCI Express.

Page 5 : Installation

Installing a video card is very simple and requires little instruction. The only thing one needs to be sure of is that they have the proper slot available, and in this case we need a PCI Express slot. Simply slide in the card, fasten it in, hook up your desired output, and boot. Once you're booted up you just need to install the drivers to get the most out of the hardware. For this installation I used the latest available drivers from nVidia's web site, Forceware 61.77.

Page 6 : Overclocking

Built upon a .13u process and being this long in the cores lifecycle give us hope for some impressive overclocking gains. To add to that, the memory has come underclocked by 55 MHz. For nVidia cards I prefer using the Coolbits registry modification which enables frequency control in the Forceware driver. From here we were able to raise the core to a speed of 533 MHz and the memory to a speed of 622 MHz without any stability issues. Suprisingly there have been even better results obtained from other users and with the addition of better cooling it should be easy enough to squeeze more from this card.

In the following section where we benchmark this card, you can find the numbers from the stock clock of 425/500 and these overclocked settings of 533/622.

Page 7 : Performance

To test the performance of the Albatron PCX5750 we use some of today's new and popular games as well as some synthetic benchmarks. The line-up of games we tested with were Doom 3, Far Cry, and Unreal Tournament 2004. The synthetic tests used were Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 SE and 3DMark 2003. While some may argue the usefulness of synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark we feel that they provide an accurate gauge of relative gaming performance among targeted generations. 3DMark 2001 SE provides a solid indication of performance one can expect compared to other cards in DirectX 7 and early DirectX 8 games. 3DMark 2003 provides us with a solid indication of performance one can expect compared to other cards in recent DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 titles. Just like any benchmark however, results for a single application are not the end-all be-all of performance judgement.

The tests were conducted using the following systems:

And strictly for comparisons sake we have an AGP system:

These synthetic results give us a clue as to what to expect in game performance. Obviously the PCX5750 should have no problems with older titles. Next, lets look at the game performance figures.

Page 8 : Performance Continued

The performance of the PCX5750 isn't too bad, but not enough to rival the good old 9700 Pro. It does seem apparent that the performance hit of moving to 8xAF is less on the PCX5750 than the ATi card. Though not quite 'free', Anisotropic Filtering definately makes an impressive impact on image quality.

Page 9 : Image Quality

nVidia's Forceware drivers give you the option to force Anisotropic Filtering up to 8x and Anti-Aliasing up to 8xS (combination of 4x Rotated Grid Multi Sampling + 1×2 Super Sampling). Also available are adjustments to disable specific filtering optimizations and to force filtering methods such as Bilinear and Trilinear. It would definately be helpful to have a real-time preview of the effect disabling/enabling such settings have on the final image though.

Throughout gameplay and testing with this card there were no visual degradations in image quality that were noticable compared to an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro. Because this card isn't capable of sustaining playable framerates with 4xAA in today's newest games it didn't seem worthwhile to include such numbers, but rather 8xAF numbers which as you can see in the screenshots below improved image quality considerably.

Page 10 : Conclusion

The
Albatron PCX5750 Trinity
is certainly not the ideal choice for gaming. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of high-end PCI Express cards widely available that can compete with the high-end AGP solutions. The performance delivered by the PCX5750 would serve the casual gamer or someone looking for a stop-gap quite well.

The price of this card isn't going to kill your budget thankfully, and especially considering the cost of moving to a new motherboard, processor, and graphics card all at once – this may be enough to get you by until the Spring/Summer refresh of 2005.

The overclocking ability of this card is really what impressed me the most. Achieving more than a 20% gain in core and memory clock is nothing to sneeze at. I'd be very interested in finding out just how much higher these cards could go if given some more powerful cooling and something to cool the rear memory chips.

While I don't recommend the early jump to the new LGA 775 platform, I can safely recommend this card to those of you who've already made that decision or have plans to go to an Intel system in the future, but don't want to spend an arm and a leg for high-end parts that are currently in short supply.

Advantages

Affordable
PCI Express
DirectX 9.0
Lots of overclocking headroom

Disadvantages

Initial entry into platform isn't cheap
Slower on next generation games
Last generation technology