An affordable upgrade that can bring 1329 percent more performance than integrated graphics

Jul 10, 2008 08:09 GMT  ·  By

Albatron Technology has recently announced three new PCI based graphics cards. The PCI8600GT-256X, the PCI8500GT-256X and the PCI8400GS-256 are meant to get the GeForce 8 Series graphics to the old PCI technology, since those motherboards needed a performance boost to their integrated-graphics, so Albatron decided to leave aside the latest PCI Express and focus on this direction.

The last seven years brought to the market millions of motherboards featuring integrated graphics and no AGP or PCI Express slots. Today's graphics industry is dominated almost exclusively by PCI Express, which means that these millions of boards cannot be upgraded to the latest graphics technology, although they feature the traditional PCI slots. Before Albatron's initiative, a complete system upgrade was the only alternative in the area. The new PCI based VGA cards from Albatron make the recent NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series graphics technology available for upgrades. Thus, you don't have to empty your pockets for a brand new system.

The new PCI graphics cards will allow a system that features an integrated GFX mainboard to configure dual monitors through their multiple video adapters. Single-PCIe-VGA motherboards are also enabled to add up to four monitors. This is a considerably big step forward, since there are a lot of applications that need more than one or two monitors to run on, and the most recent graphics cards only bring average support for two monitors. Users can engage in multiple activities without the need to cycle through applications all the time.

According to 3DMark2006 scores, the difference between the new PCI 8 Series VGA cards and the integrated graphics is astonishing, rising up to 1329 percent. The system used for testing featured an Intel 915G MB, Pentium-4 520 (2.8 GHz) CPU, DDRII 800 1GB, and Windows XP. The cards can also be adapted to smaller cases, since they are low-profile ones. The DDR III memory featured by PCI8600GT and PCI8500GT brings additional boot in performance. As for connectivity, the cards come with HDMI, DVI and TV-Out connectors.

No doubt that those millions of motherboards with no AGP/PCIe slots are considered the misfits of the new graphics era, mainly due to their limitation in upgrade options. However, their capabilities are not questioned, nor their huge number. Albatron's new PCI 8 Series VGA cards allow effortless upgrades and great savings, and also help rescue the species.

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