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Gigabyte Radeon X600 XT GV-RX60X128V Review
[Abstract]
A few weeks ago we examined the Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard. The board was packed to the brim with features, most notably the adoption of the PCI Express bus for the expansion bays. Gone...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
A few weeks ago we examined the Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard. The board was packed to the brim with features, most notably the adoption of the PCI Express bus for the expansion bays. Gone are the days of AGP-based video cards, as we welcome in the new era of PCI-Express based video cards.
PCI-Express was develped in order to meet the ever-increasing demands of more and more bandwidth required between devices. As such, one of the primary focuses of the new bus is increased bandwidth, allowing up 8 GB/s in full-duplex mode. PCI-Express also unified the AGP and PCI bus, thus removing the restriction of only one high-end (read AGP) vide card per system. Upcoming chipsets support the use of two powerful video cards simultaneously, something we haven't seen since the earlier days of 3D acceleration ala Voodoo2.
Today we?re examining the one of the first video cards that was available this summer for early adopters of the PCI-Express bus: the Gigabyte GV-RX60X128V. Based upon ATI's X600 XT, the Gigabyte card was among the most powerful cards that was widely available at the time as the PCI-Express variants based on the X800 were extremely rare.
Unlike the X800 which was built on an entirely new architecture, the X600 XT can be seen as the PCIE variant of ATI's extremely popular 9600XT. Architecturally, they are very similar, as they both have a 4 pipeline architecture, with a 128-bit DDR memory interface and support for PS2.0 shaders. They even share the same clock speed, set at 300Mhz. However, the X600 XT has the upper hand in memory speed as its memory is clocked at 370Mhz, a healthy 70Mhz jump over the memory paired with the 9600XT.
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