Nvidia 6800 Ultra vs GeCube X850XT Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

The ATI Radeon X850XT

Since we didn’t have direct contact with ATI, we decided to put the GeCube Uni-Wise X850XT to go head to head against the 6800U. Thanks to GeCube’s Uni-Wise cooling solution, the single slot heatpiped cooler not only looks great it also reflects the level of research GeCube has put into their X850XT. If you put the X800XT beside the X850XT, you’ll probably find no difference between them both because they look the same, especially with the Uni-Wise cooler. Physically, the X850XT is smaller and more compact than the 6800U. This is good news for SFF users as a 6800U will never fit into a SFF. On the other hand, the X850XT lacks the support for dual VGA support.

On the back of the card, we found a large piece of aluminium backplate that not only serves to hold the cooler in place but also doubles as a memory heatspreader.

Then there’s the ATI Rage Theater video chip that gives users Video In Video Out (VIVO) functions. A card with VIVO will allow users to transfer video into the PC without the use of an additional capture card. You can transfer your favourite home videos directly through the card and burn them into DVD. The provided video editing software should get you going towards editing and creating your own videos. This VIVO feature found on the X850XT is another plus point because the 6800U does not support VIVO.

The X850XT comes standard with dual DVI output, which should satisfy all your LCD output needs.

Just like the 6800U, the X850XT requires an additional power connector thus a 6-pin PCI-E power connector is required. The “yellow?connector beside the power connector is the front panel video composite input. If your power supply doesn’t come with a PCI-E connector, you can simply use the provided converter to connect an ordinary 4-pin power connector to the graphics card.

The cooler on our X850XT is much smaller than the cooler on the 6800U. Although it may lack in size, it does not lack in performance. The Uni-Wise cooler has a single heatpipe inside the heatsink which improves the cooler’s cooling capacity.

Upon removing the cooler, we found a layer of protective plastic sticker covering most of the part of the base except for the GPU and RAM contact areas. This helps to prevent the base from touching unwanted parts on the card that might fry the card. GeCube used a layer of thermal paste on the GPU core and thermal pads on the RAM chips.

Dubbed R480, the X850XT has the fastest GPU that ATI has to offer. Clocked at 520MHz, the X850XT has a much faster core than the 6800U with a difference of 120MHz. The X850XT has a total of 256MB onboard, which was manufactured by Samsung with the model number of K4J55323QF-GC16. This is the exactly same memory chip we found on the 6800U. Even though the 6800U has the same memory chip, the X850XT was slightly running slower at 580MHz (1080MHz effective).

Package and Bundle

Since the X850XT we have today is a retail unit, there is much to talk about. The retail package is pretty fancy and neat. Inside the package, we have a bunch of cables, connectors and dual DVI-VGA converters. Then, there was the user manual, drivers, PowerDVD and PowerDirector software for all your video editing needs.



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