Albatron's Trinity PCX5900
Less leather, more blue

Albatron's Trinity PCX5900 sits atop the company's PCI Express graphics lineup, but it's really only a mid-range card. The PCX5900 is based on the same NV35 GPU that powers the GeForce FX 5900 series, but with a core clock of only 350MHz, the chip is running much slower than it does on even the GeForce FX 5900 XT, which runs at 400MHz. Lower clock speeds, combined with a price tag a little over $200, make the Trinity PCX5900 a decidedly middle-of-the-road part.

At first glance, the Trinity PCX5900 looks like a monster. A big, bright, blue monster.

The card is nearly nine inches long—a full two and a half inches longer than the Radeon X600 XT cards we're looking at today. This beast might be a tight fit for small form factor systems like Shuttle's XPC SB81P.

Once you get over the card's size, you have to come to terms with its color. Everything is blue, and not an understated blue that's easy to ignore. If you happen to like blue, this card might just be perfect for you. Otherwise, you might want to reconsider that case window.

The Trinity PCX5900 is equipped with cooling implements to cover not only the card's graphics chip, but also all its memory chips and NVIDIA HSI bridge. Half of the card's memory chips are actively-cooled by the GPU cooler, while the others share a passive heat sink with the bridge chip.

Albatron populates the Trinity PCX5900 with eight Hynix HY5DU283222AF-28 memory chips rated for operation at speeds up to 350MHz, or an effective 700MHz with DDR clock-doubling in action. The card's memory chips are only clocked to an effective 550MHz, though, possibly leaving some headroom for overclocking.

As I mentioned earlier, the PCX5900 uses NVIDIA's HSI bridge chip to interface the NV35 GPU with a PCI Express X16 bus. The bridge chip die is tiny, but it comes on a comparatively large package, as you can see in the picture on the right above.

The Trinity has all the ports you'd expect from a mid-range graphics card: VGA, DVI, and S-Video outputs. The port arrangement is a little odd, but doesn't seem to create any problems.

Albatron ships the Trinity PCX5900 with an S-Video-to-composite video adapter and a composite video cable, but curiously, no S-Video cable or DVI-to-VGA adapter. Given the Trinity's multimonitor potential, which leans heavily on NVIDIA's excellent nView software, it's disappointing that Albatron didn't at least include a VGA-to-DVI adapter.

In the software department, the Trinity PCX5900 comes with a full copy of WinDVD Creator, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project, and a cheesy game demo CD. This is the kind of game bundle that makes me cringe. Not only is Manhattan Project ancient, so are all the games on the demo CD. The GeForce PCX5900 might not be cutting-edge graphics technology, but it's certainly capable of playing recent games. Unfortunately, the game bundle doesn't reflect that.

Albatron covers the Trinity PCX5900 with a three-year labor and one-year parts warranty. That's not a great deal, but not a horrible one, either.