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Hey, is the Albatron FX5900 Turbo 256mb any good? (Considering buying it..)

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ArucasA

Registered
Joined
Jul 8, 2004
Hey guys, im currently building up a new pc and I found a great price for the albatron fx5900 turbo, a mere 177$ flat CANADIAN... so thats like 5bucks american? ;)

Anywho, is the card any good? will it be able to handle warcraft 3 (i have an ati 9000 pro atm, war3 is CHUNKY :( )... more importantly will it be able to handle doom 3 and hl2? (assuming the rest of my new pc will be fairly decent)

Is the card easy to overclock? Do I want to overclock it.. ? lol

Any info would help me greatly, as there are only a few reviews online ;P

Thanks!
Cheers,

-A.
 
Ah nice then... what about next gen games coming up like doom 3 / hl2 ? As long as it can play it (doesnt have to be on max settings.. but at least NOT on the lowest.?)

Thx

-A.
 
this is my second albatron. and i plan on makin it 3 in mid july when they release their 6800. very nice cards imho and great overclockers too.
you should be able to play d3/hl2 no prob, but not on high settings.
 
I'm on my second Albatron card right now - sold my old Ti4200 last December, and purchased an FX5900. Runs 500 core/975 memory all day, up from the default 400/850 defaults. This is after a successful FX5950 Ultra flash, of course. ;)

Using a finance currency converter, 177 Canadian turns out to be $134 US dollars. The only question here is WHY HAVEN'T YOU BOUGHT IT YET? That's an amazing deal, even if it was for the lowest bottom-of-the-bin FX5900XT available anywhere. Just to be sure, this is the model with 256MB of memory at 850 MHz and a 410MHz core clock, correct?
http://www.albatron.com.tw/english/it/vga/specification.asp?pro_id=69
$134 for that card is an absolutely amazing deal; a comparable card would still cost well over $200USD...

For overclocking, I'd look to hit at a very miminum 470 on the core and 950 on the memory. Performance would be comparable at that speed to an FX5950 Ultra; it's worth trying the 5950 Ultra flash...

Warcraft 3 is going to be an absolute cakewalk for a card like this; the rest of your system will count more for games like that anyway, but rest assured it will do it just fine.

Doom 3 will definitely be fine for the FX5900 cards; it's an OpenGL game, and nvidia's OpenGL support is top-notch. If it will struggle with a game, it'll be DirectX-based games like Half-Life 2... the FX series cards had lackluster DX9 support, at best. But at least you have brute memory bandwidth and fill rate to counter that a little bit. I'd look at 1024x768 probably being the playable res for HL2 on that card... but alas, we'll only know for sure once it's released. With many of the driver revisions, I've found the FX5900 image quality to be perfectly acceptable, despite what the fanboys were saying a few months back.

Anisotropic filtering hits the FX cards really bad - thier algorithm for AF isn't efficient at all. You can expect a huge performance hit when you go from the 4x to the 8x setting, and many games become pretty well unplayable. 4x is definitely where to set it for most games, or 2x if you like high frames better. It's not quite as good-looking as the ATi AF, either.

But the anti-aliasing is pretty well sorted out. Since it's mostly dependent on memory bandwidth, anyway, the FX5900s are well-suited to it, due to the crazy memory bandwidth. For my purposes, 2xAA is pretty well free, and 4xAA takes a significant performance hit only after you get up to 1600x1200 resolutions.
 
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Jump On That Deal Right Now

Man I paid $209 u.s. dollars for a weaker albatron fx5900 epv. The turbo should be nice, and for only $134 u.s. dollars thats one of the best deals around. BTW, where did you find this deal? The card must bwe able to overclock well, and even better after a flash. Mine hasn't been flashed and has overclocked pretty decenty. Buy that card now!
 
Hey guys, thx for great replies! Now I can't wait to receive it :D It'll be here in 6-7 business days, i'll take pictures ;)

I currently reside in Canada, and prices here are totally inflated... the reason why I'm only paying 177$ flat (CND) is because I have a cousin who lives in Switzerland and his neighbour gave him the card brand new as a grad present... he doesn't have a use for it what so ever, and said I could have it for free. The 177$ comes from the fact that I owe him 177$ from my last visit to their family last year (i ran out of money :p)

In original post didn't feel like you guys wanted to read the background story behind it, so instead I just wrote I was buying it for $177 :)

Also, yes the link you posted,
http://www.albatron.com.tw/english/it/vga/specification.asp?pro_id=69
is the same card that Im talking about :)

So is this card easily OC'able? Just curious.. hehe

As for the rest of the PC, im probably gonna have to buy here... but I was planning on asking peoples opinions on the rest of the parts so far... should I make a new post or just write in here? You guys seem like you know what your talking about hehe :) Just one or two opinions would be good.



Thanks a lot again!

A.
 
So you got it for you $177 Canadian, eh? Very nice! You definitely owe your cousin for that one!!! Make sure to buy him a brew or three next time he visits. Beer evens everything up. ;) What an absolutely phenomenal deal.

And yes, the overclocking will be no big deal at all. It's easy using the CoolBits registry entry, and it ought to give you good yields, too. Albatron cards are really very good.

When you get it, you can either post in this thread or another - makes little difference. Oooh, you have a whole PC to build? There will be plenty of people ready and willing to help you out when the time comes.
 
Hehe thx :) Help is good on these boards :D

Okay, ill make a new post regarding what my options are for pc parts atm... where would it be appropriate? In this section?

Thx again :)

-A.
 
Hey man post some pictures of that bueaty when you gett it. also some benchmark scores to. And- don't forget how high you overclocked it! THat thing should be a beast thanks to albatron's cooling idea. I wish I could have gotten it for that cheap...
 
If you have questions about other parts (CPUs, memory, etc.) be sure to post new threads in the proper, respecive categories. You tend to get people who sort of "specialize" in certain things, and having them in the proper categories will help your cause, as well as keep the mods off your back. :)
 
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