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Abit R9550-Guru Review
[Abstract]
A Tale of Two BIOSIt is the best of times for overclocking fanatics, with many hardware vendors conjuring various models catering to the enthusiast market. Over the years we've seen great leaps...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
A Tale of Two BIOS
It is the best of times for overclocking fanatics, with many hardware vendors conjuring various models catering to the enthusiast market. Over the years we've seen great leaps and bounds in the progression of overclocking friendly tools, such that even the typical consumer would have some inkling on what overclocking means by now.
However, looking at the situation in the opposite light, one could perceive this as the worst of times. After all, what comes after a peak but an inevitable decline? Are we reaching a saturation point for overclocking, where almost anything possible has been tried? Overclocking has gone mainstream, been simplified, and now even automated. The Wild West has been tamed so what happens to the cowboys now? Would the more elitist enthusiasts move on to other challenges now that their obsessions are no longer accorded cult status? The reality is not as dire as we have depicted and depending on your point of view, it could be either way. While we may not have the definitive answer, our observations indicates that the urge to overclock is still flowing strongly in the veins of the hardcore enthusiasts, albeit they've moved on to more advanced cooling gear.
To satiate these users, the hardware still has to be geared for such usage and who better to turn to than the established leader in the overclocking arena, ABIT. True to its history, ABIT has always had a deserved reputation for targeting the enthusiasts with its pro-overclocking products. This is the company that made jumperless motherboards famous and offered highly tweakable BIOS through its Softmenu. All are features that we take for granted nowadays. Not to mention that it holds overclocking clinics and has made the headlines for teaming up with one of the most famous professional gamers, Fatal1ty, to design performance oriented hardware for gamers and enthusiasts alike.
What we have in our labs today is yet another excellent example of ABIT's goal to make overclocking even more accessible to everyone. Their latest graphics card using ABIT's vGuru technology is based on ATI's low-cost mainstream AGP 8x based Radeon 9550 VPU (visual processing unit). What's so new about a Radeon 9550 card at this point of time you ask? As we have found out, this unusual card, the ABIT R9550-256Guru does not only have ABIT's vGuru overclocking and hardware monitoring tools; it also has two different modes of operation, a Normal and a Turbo, which can be triggered via a jumper that switches between the two BIOS signatures present within the card. It is also one of the rare few cards of this caliber that's equipped with a generous and perhaps excessive 256MB frame buffer. Before we continue further, let us take a look at the card and the technical mumbo-jumbo specs.
What does ABIT bring to its special Guru-branded RADEON 9550? You'll find out soon enough on the following page and it's definitely delectable. |
ABIT R9550-256Guru Technical Specifications
| GraphicsEngine | - ATIRadeon 9550 VisualProcessing Unit (VPU)
- VPUclock = 250MHz (Normal Mode)
- VPUclock = 300MHz (Turbo Mode)
- 4parallel rendering pipelines
- 2 parallelgeometry engines
- 128-bitmemory interface
- AGP8X/4X/2X
- SMARTSHADER?2.0
- Full support forMicrosoft?DirectX?9.0 programmable vertex and pixelshadersin hardware
- 2.0Vertex Shaders
- Supportsvertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
- 2.0Extended Pixel Shaders
- Supports up to1,536 instructions and 16 textures perrendering pass
- 32temporary and constant registers
- 128-bit, 64-bit& 32-bit per pixel floating pointcolor formats
- Multiple RenderTarget (MRT) support
- Completefeature set also supported in OpenGL?via extensions
- 2x/4x/6xfull scene anti-aliasing modes
- Sparsemulti-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable samplepatterns, and centroid sampling
- LosslessColor Compression (up to6: 1) at all resolutions
- TemporalAnti-Aliasing
- 2x/4x/8x/16xanisotropic filtering modes
- Up to 128-taptexture filtering
- (Adaptivealgorithm with bi-linear (performance) andtri-linear (quality) options)
- HYPERZ? III+
- 3-level HierarchicalZ-Buffer with early Z test
- Lossless Z-Buffercompression (up to 48:1)
- Fast Z-Buffer Clear
- Z cache optimizedfor real-time shadow rendering
- VIDEOSHADER?
- Seamless integrationof pixel shaders with video in realtime
- FULLSTREAM?video de-blocking technology for Real,DivX, and WMV9 formats
- VIDEOSOAP?noise removal filtering for capturedvideo
- All-format DTV/HDTVdecoding
- Adaptive Per-PixelDe-Interlacing and Frame RateConversion (temporal filtering)
- Dualintegrated display controllers
- Single and dual linkexternal TMDS transmitter support forhigh resolution and/or multi-monitor DVI configurations
| | GraphicsMemory | - 256MBDDR SDRAM
- Memory clock =400MHz DDR (Normal Mode)
- Memory clock =500MHz DDR (Turbo Mode)
| | RAMDAC | - Dualintegrated 10-bit perchannel 400 MHz DACs
- Integrated165 MHz TMDStransmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant and HDCP ready)
| | I/OFaceplate Connectors | - DVI-Iconnector
- mini-DINoutput
- StandardVGA monitor output
| | Drivers& Software | - Driversupport for Windows 98SE/ Me / 2000 / XP
- vGURUUtility
- CyberLinkPowerDVD 5.0
| | OtherInformation | - AGP2.0 / 3.0 slot required (1.5V)
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ABIT Computer Sells Fab, Outsources Production (2005-09-23)