Albatron is one of those companies that is a quiet player in the market. Not quiet in the fact that they do produce some great performing products, but quiet in the fact that you just do not hear a lot about them. They are not a flashy company. They just do what they do, and then leave it up to the consumer to buy their products, plain and simple. They are kind of like the blue-collar players in the industry. In all the years that we have dealt with Albatron products, we cannot remember a time that we had an issue with one. Grant it, most of our experience has been with their motherboards, and not their video cards like their GeForce 9600 GT version that we are looking at today. - Legit Reviews

Albatron GeForce 9600 GT 512MB Video Card Review

As we take a look at the Albatron GeForce 9600 GT5 12MB, you can see that Albatron really has gone with a rather plain looking exterior for the card. No monsters or half naked cartoon women or anything like that on this card. Just the NVIDIA and the Albatron logo that is on the fan. It is also obvious that this card is a single slot card, with a single fan to cool the card. The GeForce 9600 GT series of cards use one 6-pin power connecter from your power supply, unlike the GeForce 9800 series, which takes two 6-pin connectors. If you do not have a 6-pin on your power supply, Albatron supplies an adaptor for you to use.

The packaging of the Albatron GeForce 9600 GT 512MB was fine. The labeling on the box gives you the basic info about the card. Once you open it up, you are greeted with the video card in a static wrap. Everything else that comes with the card is under the top layer of the interior box. We were quite pleased with the overclocking we were able to do on this card. The default speeds on the card are 650/1800MHz for the core and memory clock and 1625MHz for the shaders. Using PowerStrip for our overclocking, we were able to get 755/2340MHz out of the core and memory with 1888MHz out of the shader clock.

It has been a little while since we had actually used a NVIDIA based video card in my test rig. After using this one, we can tell you that it will be staying for now. Hands down it handled today's modern games better than the ATI Radeon HD 3850 card. Game play was smooth as silk, even at higher resolutions. The packaging for the Albatron GeForce 9600 GT is not too bad. We really like to see current game titles thrown in to entice people to purchase. It seems to add even more value to the bundle to get a $30-50 game that will show off the cards ability. Though this would certainly increase the price tag as such.

The heat on the GeForce 9600 GT was minimal when compared to the Radeon HD 3850. The cooling solution that Albatron uses works wonderfully on this card, keeping temps to a respectable level. Noise was also not very bad at all, in fact we really hardly noticed it enough to remember to write about it, even with an open bench setup. It should be mentioned that the ATI card was noticeably louder than the GeForce 9600 GT throughout our testing. Albatron did tell us that the pricing of the Albatron GeForce 9600 GT 512MB would be roughly $150, but it is up to the channel to set the street price.

The Albatron GeForce 9600 GT 512MB is a solid performing card that comes in way over the top of the ATI Radeon HD 3850, which is a card that is in a similar price range once all the rebates are figured out. The price versus performance value on these mainstream cards is excellent. If you are looking for a card that is a solid performer without breaking that bank, this is one should be looking at.