Date: March 7th, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Albatron

PRODUCT COMPOSITION & FEATURES

Just what do you get with this economical purchase?

Upon opening the box you will get....

A driver CD, a free copy of WinDVD (software DVD viewing suite) and the usual owners manual.

A video-out cable, a S-Video to composite converter and a composite video cable to hook the card to your TV.

And you will get your videocard.

This card in particular is Dual Display capable and gives you a selection of either a VGA connection for a CRT monitor or a DVI connector for that new digital LCD TFT flat panel you just purchased. But hey, if you have a 60 inch projection screen TV, you can hook it up to the video-out and play your favorite computer game theater-style.

Covering the GPU core and the 3.6ns Samsung memory is an all aluminum heatsink with fan. This is a great feature on a budget card and should help in the overclocking department.

The only concern that I had is the improper orientation of the cooling fins on the memory bank under the "AGP 8X" label. For better cooling, the fins should be oriented perpendicular to the way they are currently oriented. This will allow some air to flow through the fins instead of being blocked off as it is now. The way that it is oriented currently, it will allow the memory in this section of the heatsink to be warmer than the memory cooled by the other section of the heatsink which will cause a relative difference between the memory bank operating temperatures. Uneven cooling can lead to overclocking instability and could really hinder the card's high end overclock.

But! Does this minor problem really affect this card? Let's see in the benchmarking.....