is extremely pleased to present our latest review. Thanks to our friends at both eVGA and ATI we are finally able to take a look two of the fastest stock AGP cards available on the market. We are not the biggest hardware review website on the internet so for us to be able to bring this type of review is only due to the generosity of the kind folks at each of the respective companies. Availability has been an issue with this latest generation of high end Video Cards, producing pieces that are able to run at blistering speeds is no doubt very difficult so understandably samples to a smaller site like us would is tough.Last year we brought our readers an article called ‘The Battle at $399 featuring the X800 Pro and the eVGA 6800 GT. Today we not only get a look at the high end AGP Video Cards but we get to take this look with drivers much more mature than when these Cards first appeared on the market. Sorry we’re so late with this but we get a chance to show everyone what time and mature drivers can do to a product and for that we are excited.
With PCI-Express Motherboards and Video Cards finally saturating the market we see the demand in the AGP starting to drop. The 6800 Ultra is now selling for around $454. This is quite a change from a few months ago when these cards were selling for more than their actual MSRP. The ATI X800XT PE is still a ‘diamond in the rough?and being able to purchase one for its?MSRP of $499 is still not realistic. Checking a few different websites it was easy to see the X800XT PE's selling for about $50 over its?MSRP and availability was still limited.
For this review, being that these two Video Cards are the best of the best, we didn't screw around. Most benchmarks were run at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 8x AF enabled. Why pay $500 if not to enable all the eye candy and run high resolutions, it's also fun to beat the crap out of a new Video Card to really see how well they perform ?theres no 1024x768 testing here! A few benchmarks that we used we did drop to 1280x1024 like Doom 3. Other theoretical applications like Aquamark 3.0, 3D Mark 2001 SE, 3D Mark 2003 and 3D Mark 2005 we ran at the default settings giving the user a chance to compare scores with us. As far as overclocking ?we did not get into any with this review. We just felt these Video Cards were as fast as they needed to be, also overclocking milage may vary and we didn't want to give anyone false hopes on what to expect when overclocking. Oh yea, and there is that $500 price tag ?are a few extra frames really worth burning up that new $500 Video Card ?and while I can hear a collective “Hell Yeah?we still opted to pass on overclocking either card.
Let's take a quick look at the specs of each card and get right into the testing?
Head-to-Head Specification Comparison
Next Page - Specifications and Features: ATI X800XT PE
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