Albatron GeForce FX5900XTV

Introduction

It’s truly amazing what a lot Albatron has achieved in such a small space of time. It was only in 2002 that Albatron came into being and ever since their arrival; Albatron has been a major driving force in the PC market for motherboards and graphic cards. If you haven’t already heard of Albatron, then you certainly are missing out a lot, have a look around their website here. We have done quite a few reviews of their products over the past, all of which have been formidable competitors of their range.

Today we have one of their newest offerings, the FX5900 XTV. The battle in the 3D graphic card arena continues, not so much in the high-end arena nowadays, but mostly in the value budget area. The main competitors in the market are ATI and nVidia. ATI captures the market with its R3xx core which is a real work horse, having a small but fast pipeline. nVIdia cards are designed around the NV3x cores, which have larger and fast pipelines. Even though it may seem that ATI is at a disadvantage performance wise, ATI cards can easily match nVidia card’s performances in their respective range and sometimes even perform faster.

The FX 5900XT series is catered for the value oriented performance seeker, with the lower success of the FX5700 series. The FX5900XT versions differ from other FX5900 models by way of lower clock speeds and less amounts of memory. Time to take a closer look at the Albatron FX5900 XTV.

The Card

The FX5900XTV is shipped out in a pretty nice looking box as you see here in the pictures and it provides adequate protection to the card during transport.

The Albatron FX5900XTV supports VIVO hence the word XTV. The package comes with a VIVO adapter and an S-video cable so that you could hook the card’s output to a TV if the need maybe. Also provided was an AV cable so that you can attach any other video source to the card and a DVI connector.

The VIVO adapter consists of 4 ports, 2 S-video ports for video in/out and two AV ports again for video in/out.

Albatron provides a decent software bundle with the card; namely Duke Nukem Manhattan project, a demo CD with 5 games (AOWII, MaxPAYNE, Zax, BeaMBreaker, RallyTrophy), Power DVD, Power Director and of course the driver CD.