Albatron GeForce PCX5750

PCI Express is a versatile I/O interconnect technology that will eventually completely replace existing PCI technology as well as the current video card interconnect - AGP. The key difference between PCI and PCI Express is that "classic" PCI is a parallel bus architecture; whereas, PCI Express is a point-to-point serial I/O technology. It only takes a few numbers to see the advantage. The older PCI technology's bandwidth was limited to about 132 megabytes per second (MB/s), which is shared by all PCI slots and anything else that uses the PCI bus. Each data lane (a set of pins in the slot) in a PCI Express link can provide 200 MB/s (I've also seen this number many places as 250 MB/s, but Intel's documents say 200) of bandwidth, and this is not shared! Each PCI Express slot has its own data lane(s). PCI Express was designed with scalability in mind, with the number of data lanes being scalable based on foreseen demand. For instance, on most mainstream consumer motherboards introduced any time soon, we can probably expect to see a few single-lane (x1) links (slots on the motherboard), possibly one or two two-lane (x2) slots, and one sixteen-lane (x16) link. Basically, PCI Express is the future because it offers more bandwidth, and the point-to-point design eliminates potential resource contention issues to which the shared PCI bus was susceptible.

Recently, I took a look at a motherboard from Albatron Technology featuring PCI Express expansion slots. Not surprisingly, Albatron is also offering some PCI Express video cards that can be paired with this mainboard (or any motherboard with a PCI Express x16 slot). Today, we are going to look at the PCX5750 from Albatron. As the name suggests, this board is based on NVIDIA's GeForce PCX 5750 graphics chip. Some people may not be too excited about this product since it is a mainstream PCI Express board, but their opinions would probably change if they knew how much I was able to overclock it using only stock cooling. Read on to find out about the incredible overclocking potential of the Albatron PCX5750.