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GeCube Radeon X800 XL Review
[Abstract]
Final thoughtsAdvertismentATI and its partners have tried to cleverly position their RADEON X800 XL 256MB cards at a price point that's clearly below that of most GeForce 6800 GT's. Our perform...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
Final thoughtsAdvertisment
ATI and its partners have tried to cleverly position their RADEON X800 XL 256MB cards at a price point that's clearly below that of most GeForce 6800 GT's. Our performance graphs indicate that it trades blows with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT in a variety of games, often winning in D3D titles and losing out in OpenGL tests. That, in my mind, makes it an attractive VPU to base a retail card upon, and GeCube has taken the challenge of introducing an AGP variant of the native PCI-Express design.
The bridged card opens up the X800 XL for a well-established market that covers a plethora of chipsets, and the Rialto bridge doesn't appear to hurt performance at all. GeCube's eschewed the reference design by using an in-house cooling system, although it's not as elegant as the company's Uni-Wise implementation. Going with a custom cooler has added extra noise over and above the reference card's, so GeCube loses a few marks here. The card, too, is a larger-than-normal affair, making installation into small form-factor PCs needlessly difficult. The saving grace, as far as design is concerned, is the inclusion of ATI's no-frills Rage Theater ASIC, giving rise to basic VIVO functionality. The bundle makes a point of reiterating the card's HDTV and VIVO compatibility, but, other than that, it's strictly average.
GeCube's X800XLA-VIVO is based on a successful VPU but doesn't make full use of it. Ideally, what I'd like to see is an AGP model outfitted with Uni-Wise cooling and housed on a smaller PCB. As it is, the GeCube X800XLA-VIVO is a simply average implementation of a decent VPU.
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ATI Unveils Mobility RADEON X800 XT for DTR Laptops (2005-06-08)