When it comes to graphics cards I have to be honest Albatron do not always come to mind which is surprising given their products are usually very good. In fact I cannot recall ever disliking an Albatron graphics card as they are usual quite well equipped and very well priced. The majority of the time I feel Albatron go somewhat unnoticed because they fail to focus on any one kind of product. While their graphics cards are good, so to are their motherboards, flash devices and even their displays. Albatron has not really made a name for themselves in any one category.
Take their graphics cards for example while they do fully support the GeForce 7 series they generally offer only one or two cards at the most on any one GPU. Of course there is no need to offer more than two graphics cards based on the same GPU if you have a standard and a worked version. For example the Albatron GeForce 7800GT, 7900GT, 7900GTX and 7950GX2 graphics cards all stick to the NVIDIA reference design, which is why I was surprised with their 7300GT graphics card.
The GeForce 7300GT is a passively cooled graphics card and although manufacturers such as MSI and many others went with a small simple heatsink, Albatron went all out. This passive heatsink design uses heatpipe technology along with a few different types of aluminum fins to cool the 7300GT. In fact the passive heatsink design bares a number of similarities to those featured on ASUS graphics cards. Not only does this heatsink do its job well, it also looks quite impressive and at $80 US this is the kind of graphics card you could actually show off!
The GeForce 7300GT specifications are quite impressive for an $80 US graphics card. While the 7600GT boasts 12 pixel pipelines, the 7300GT still does quite well featuring a total of 8 pixel pipelines. The 90nm core also supports 4 vertex units and a 128-bit memory interface. The 7300GT does lose out when it comes to clock frequencies. This is because the core is clocked at just 350MHz, which looks somewhat bleak when compared to the 560MHz core clock of the 7600GT. The memory frequency is also quite low, as the 7300GT features GDDR2 memory clocked at 667MHz while the 7600GT runs GDDR3 memory at 1.4GHz!
Clearly the GeForce 7300GT is going to suffer performance wise due to the low core and memory frequencies. Nevertheless, we must not loose sight of what the 7300GT is, that being an $80 US budget graphics card for the masses. Keeping that in mind Albatron has identified the key weakness of this product and addressed it with their GeForce 7300GT graphics card. This 7300GT product features a core clock frequency of 400MHz which is 50MHz above spec. The memory has also been overclocked from 667MHz to a much healthier 800MHz.
It appears that Albatron is shipping their GeForce 7300GT with Hynix ICs onboard; they have used the HY5PS561621AFP-25 parts. These GDDR2 memory modules are rated at 800MHz; given that they are already clocked at 800MHz, it will be interesting to see how much overclocking headroom they have. The card features 256MB of this memory onboard, utilizing a 128-bit memory bus and produces 10.7GB/s of bandwidth at the default NVIDIA clock specifications. It is interesting to note that Albatron uses the exact same memory chips on their GeForce 7600GS graphics card.
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