Albatron FX5600EQ

With 256MB of RAM, John Gillooly finds a heavy Albatron hanging round his neck.

These are the moments we will tell our grandchildren about. The first ‘3D accelerators’ had a whopping 4MB of memory. This doubled to eight, jumped for a short while to 12, then 16, 32 and then 64. Today, the de facto standard is 128MB of texture memory.

Now the shift is towards 256MB of memory for the premium end of the market, with the RADEON 9800 PRO and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra appearing with 256MB onboard. We recommend you first read our Gigabyte RADEON 9800 PRO with 256MB RAM review on page 60 for the reasons behind the move to the 256MB.

Albatron has brought this memory size into the mid-range with its FX5600EQ card. The FX5600EQ differs from others on the market by having 256MB onboard. To accommodate the additional RAM the board has a reduced memory speed, which in turn is compensated by a boost in core speed, similar to the 128MB variants of the GeForce4 Ti4200. The theory behind this is that slower RAM is more affordable to board makers, reducing the price gap between the two different products. The core of the FX5600EQ runs at 325MHz and the memory at 400MHz. In comparison the 128MB version has a core speed of 270MHz but a memory speed of 550MHz, with the faster memory having the greater influence.

We tested the card using Unreal Tournament 2003, Codecreatures and 3DMark2001SE Pro. We have shown the results for testing with default settings, as the gap between the core speeds of the cards is much larger than the minor variations when using high quality, high resolution settings. We compared the card to an MSI GeForce FX 5600 with 128MB of memory.

256MB of video RAM is a luxury, no matter what angle you approach it from. At some point in the future games will catch up and start leveraging this memory size, but as our testing of Gigabyte’s RADEON 9800 PRO showed on page 60, it only comes into play in extreme situations.

When we take the importance of the memory size out of the equation, we end up with a simple picture. The Albatron FX5600EQ is slower than a standard GeForce FX 5600 card, and this shows in the performance stakes.

We are all for exotically over-specced video cards -- they satisfy the deep urge to have the most Copper-laden, chip heavy, heat-pumping card on the market. We just wish that the manufacturers didn’t make it a trade off. Give me 256MB of video RAM, but make it faster, with big spiky RAMsinks and a chunky Copper PCI-obscuring heatsink. That is doing the luxury item idea justice.

Albatron’s FX5600EQ is a good, well made video card. It just lacks any advantage over the standard model. Unless you have some obscure or special use for 256MB of memory then go for the 128MB version. It’s faster.