14 DAY TRIAL // Albatron Technology announced about two weeks ago that it plans to release on the market new video cards based on Nvidia's GeForce 8 series, but featuring PCI compatibility. We learned today that the Retrotechnology video cards wouldn't get on the market pretty soon, as there seem to be problems with some motherboards. The company announced that its engineers are working hard on resolving the compatibility issues.
It seems that some of the motherboards on the market have a different signaling implementation of PCI interface, although the PCI slots are expected to be standard. Sam Nada, Albatron's International PR representative, stated that there is a lot of work undergoing to fix the products. The strategy Albatron's engineers adopted is focused on making BIOS optimizations so that the cards will feature compatibility with a larger number of motherboards.
The PCI slot graphics cards are expected to hit the market as soon as engineers finish their work. A few estimations reveal that this will happen in the next couple of weeks.
The Retrotechnology video cards were introduced by Albatron at Computex trade show in Taiwan this year. The GeForce 8 series based graphics chips feature low power consumption. The cards are intended for users that own a motherboard with integrated graphics, but have no PCI Express slot to add one of today's video chips. The graphics performance of their machines is supposed to be brought to new high levels, as the 3DMark2006 scores marked 1329 percent better performance in comparison to the integrated graphics.
Albatron's chips also come with multiple video adapters, allowing dual monitor usage, which means that, coupled with the adapters of the single-PCIe-VGA motherboards, users will be able to add up to four monitors to the system. As soon as they hit the market, the new cards will mark a big step forward for those that own out-of-date systems.