From the top of the card you can see that it is pretty small compared to cards like the Nvidia 6800 Ultra and ATi X800 Pro. The card has a blue PCB that matches Albatron’s PX915G Pro motherboard which I will be testing this card on. There is no SLi connector on the top of the card which rules out the possibility of using two of these cards at once in the future. On the front side of the card there is a large sized heatsink which cools the GPU and RAM and looks like it will do a good job. The back side of the card does not have any cooling which shouldn’t be a problem because it will not get very hot and will receive some airflow from the rear exhaust fan.
Underneath the heatsink is the GeForce FX 5700 GPU and below that is the High Speed Interconnect (HSI) bridge chip. The HSI bridge chip allows AGP graphics processors to work on the PCI Express x16 bus. Future cards will be native PCI-Express Nvidia says but for the transition to the new standard a bridge is a much easier and cost effective solution it seems. A thermal pad was used on the core and HSI while the RAM had no pad or compound.
This video card has a VGA, DVI, and S-Video connection which is nice to see on a mid level video card. This particular card uses Hynix 4ns TSOP memory chips which is the standard for a card like this. The memory used is somewhat slow so I’m not sure how well this card is going to overclock.
Though this card is a mid level card Albatron does include Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, a 5-in-1 CD (AOWII, Max Payne, Zax, Beambreker, Rally Trophy), and drivers. Normally with a budget card like this you only get a driver CD so its nice to see some games included. A S-Video to RCA adapter is provided however there is no S-Video or RCA cable to take advantage of the TV-out. Then manual is pretty straight forward and does provide in detail all of the necessary information about the card.
