HIS Radeon X1800 XT OC Edition Dual DL-DVI VIVO Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Introduction

As we continue to unveil more Radeon X1800 XT 512MB cards, the uniformity among them all becomes more apparent. It's like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, where all the characters are dressed in depressingly similar attire and have the personality of a toaster. (To be honest, a toaster would actually be a lot quieter than a Radeon X1800 XT). Beneath the half-hearted attempts by the various brands to liven up the situation with their colorful, peeling decals and shiny boxes packed with tons of extras, the hardware is essentially the same.

To their credit, some vendors do try a bit harder to make their products special and today we have the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB from HIS, a manufacturer which has always been rather unique in its use of Arctic Cooling's Silencer line of VGA coolers to stand out from the competition. Unfortunately, HIS did not use these IceQ coolers for its Radeon X1800 XT 512MB OC Edition. Its secret weapon though lies in the 'OC Edition' part of the name, which appropriately enough stands for Overclocked Edition. The large sticker on HIS' packaging announces its daring clock speeds and will no doubt attract quite a few buyers. How would it compare against the other overclocked Radeon X1800 XT cards that we have seen from ASUS and Gigabyte? A quick look at its technical specifications may throw some light:

The 'Overclock Edition' sticker is prominently displayed on the packaging. The card though looks like every other Radeon X1800 XT.

HIS Radeon X1800 XT 512MB OC Edition Technical Specifications

GraphicsEngine	ATI Radeon X1800 GPU 321 milliontransistors on 90nm fabrication process Core Clock: 700MHz 16 pixel shaderprocessors 8 vertex shaderprocessors Ring Bus MemoryController 512-bit internalring bus for memory reads Programmableintelligent arbitration logic Fully associativetexture, color, and Z/stencil cachedesigns HierarchicalZ-buffer with Early Z test Lossless ZCompression (up to 48:1) Fast Z-Buffer Clear Z/stencil cacheoptimized for real-time shadow rendering Optimized forperformance at high display resolutions,including widescreen HDTV resolutions Ultra-Threaded ShaderEngine Support forMicrosoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware Full speed 128-bitfloating point processing for allshader operations Up to 512simultaneous pixel threads Dedicated branchexecution units for high performancedynamic branching and flow control Dedicated textureaddress units for improved efficiency 3Dc+ texturecompression Highquality 4:1 compression for normalmaps and two-channel data formats Highquality 2:1 compression for luminancemaps and single-channel data formats Multiple RenderTarget (MRT) support Render to vertexbuffer support Complete featureset also supported in OpenGL® 2.0 Advanced Image QualityFeatures 64-bit floatingpoint HDR rendering supported throughoutthe pipeline Includessupport for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing 32-bit integer HDR(10:10:10:2) format supportedthroughout the pipeline Includessupport for blending andmulti-sample anti-aliasing 2x/4x/6xAnti-Aliasing modes Multi-samplealgorithm with gammacorrection, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling NewAdaptive Anti-Aliasing feature withPerformance and Quality modes TemporalAnti-Aliasing mode LosslessColor Compression (up to 6:1) atall resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions 2x/4x/8x/16xAnisotropic Filtering modes Upto 128-tap texture filtering Adaptivealgorithm with Performance andQuality options High resolutiontexture support (up to 4k x 4k) Flexibledisplay support Programmablepiecewise linear gamma correction, colorcorrection, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) Complete,independent color controls and video overlaysfor each display High quality pre-and post-scaling engines, withunderscan support for all outputs Content-adaptivede-flicker filtering for interlaceddisplays Xilleon™TV encoder for high quality analog output YPrPb componentoutput for direct drive of HDTV displays Spatial/temporaldithering enables 10-bit color qualityon 8-bit and 6-bit displays Fast, glitch-freemode switching VGA mode support onall outputs Drive two displayssimultaneously with independentresolutions and refresh rates
GraphicsMemory	256-bit 8-channelGDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface 512MB DDR3 SDRAM Memory Clock = 1600MHz(1.25ns)
RAMDAC	Dualintegrated dual-link DVI transmitters DVI 1.0 compliant /HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready Dualintegrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
I/O FaceplateConnectors	2 x DVI-I connectors 1 x mini-DIN connector
Drivers &Software	Driver support forWindows 98 / Me / 2000 / XP CyberLink PowerDVD 6.0 CyberLinkPower2Go 4 CyberLinkPowerDirector 3 SE Plus 3DAlbumPicture Pro DungeonSiege1.1 Game Demos (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3,Half Life 2, etc)
Other Information	CrossFire EditionsAvailable Four modes ofoperation: AlternateFrame Rendering (maximumperformance) Supertiling(optimal load-balancing) Scissor(compatibility) SuperAA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum imagequality) DynamicVoltage Control NativePCI Express x16 bus interface



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