Albatron FX 5200 Ultra

Company: Albatron
Product: FX5200 Ultra
Street Price: ~$145
Date Reviewed: July 24, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

The Card Layout:

Our first impressions after receiving the card is that it is massive. The overall card itself it heavy. This is due the heatsinks that cover the card. As you can see from the pictures above, Albatron has chosen to cover all of the memory with heatsinks as well as the core. The heatsink on the graphics core looks pretty good actually using some copper with many tiny fins. The use of these heatsinks should aid a lot in overclocking, possibly making this card overclock better than others. As we stated earlier, this is the only 5200 Ultra that we have so it is hard to say how well the other cards are designed and how well they overclock.

The card is equipped with 128MB of DDR memory clocked at 600MHz. The core is clocked at 350MHz and is based on the .15 micron manufacturing process. The FX 5200 Ultra as we said earlier does support DirectX 9 as well as a few other features like AGP 8x support. This card will play the newer DirectX games but it probably won't play them very well. Some of this has to do with the smaller 128bit bus that the memory is on.

Looking at the cards I/O configuration you can see that it has of course the output to connect the monitor to the video card. Also there is a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) connector which is generally used to connect LCD monitors to the video card. As time progresses forward, we see more people use their card as part of their home multimedia center. Manufacturers know this and this is why the card also has a TV-out. Usually the image quality that is sent out to the TV is decent. We would like to have seen at TV-in to compliment the card but we're not going to be picky considering this is a budget video card.

The last major specification we would like to talk about is that the card uses an extra 4-pin connector that connects directly to the card. So the card gets a little more juice than what is available from the AGP slot. This should help in keeping the card stable when overclocking and making sure the card has plenty of power to supply the proper voltages. We'll see if it helped out in overclocking. We unplugged the cable during some of our testing and the card still ran, and there were no warnings on boot up or in WindowsXP that the extra 4-pin cable was not plugged in.

Bundled Features:

To keep costs down, Albatron has only bundled the essentials. Along with the video card you get the manual and drivers CD, which is expected. The only other piece of software that is included with the package is WinDVD Creator. For those of you who plan on using the TV-out function, the S-video to composite converter is added as well as a composite to composite cable. The only thing that we were surprised to not see included with this video card is a DVI to analog converter which is needed if you want to have dual monitor support. If you are like us though, you probably have a few just laying around from other video cards.