A new review on the Gigabyte X800 Pro has been published on Dev Hardware. A new era is upon the gaming community, where some games finally utilize so much processing power that the need for a P4 3GHz+ or equivalent processor and $400 video card is actually somewhat sound. It feels like it was just yesterday when the 5950 Ultra, 9800XT, and lesser cards modified and overclocked to match the former, reigned supreme as the top graphics accelerators available. But as the latest title from id Software shows, greater power is required and both nVidia and ATI have answered.
Digit-Life has send word that they published their review on the ASUS V9999 256MB AGP Gamer Edition video card. Today we present an unusual article. Firstly, we'll examine an original ASUS creation, some hybrid of the GeForce 6800 series. Secondly, we are very curious to compare GeForce 6800 cards with various memory capacities, because this question is still a subject of much controversy among users and our readers. But at first let's lament once again over the fact that autumn has come, but the mass sales of various GeForce 6800 cards are not yet to be seen. Sales volumes are rising very slowly, mainly of GeForce 6800. To say nothing of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, this product is extremely rare.
The Inquirer has had many mails from people who want to buy GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in Europe and US but they simply could not find any of them, anywhere. We asked nVidia about this but nVidia said that it doesn't have any yield problems and that shops have GeForce 6800 Ultra in quantity. We neglected to check on GeForce 6800 Ultra retail availability as our gimlet-like eyes were fixed on the catastrophically hard to get X800XT PE card.
It's almost just a press edition but you can buy the Radeon X800XT PE. If you are very persistent, you can find quite few of them in German and US shops.
Hi-TechReviews send word of their ATI Radeon X600 Review. The Radeon X600 is not a complete revision of past cores but instead the Radeon X600 has the feature set and hardware support as the very popular Radeon 9600XT.
Rage3D has published a review
on the ATI Silencer 1, 2
& 3. After their release of the VGA Silencer, Arctic Cooling quickly
earned a respected reputation and became known as the manufacturer of one of the
most popular VGA coolers ever created. The unique design made the VGA Silencer
an excellent performer, but what really impressed most people was how whisper
quiet the unit was.
ATI Technologies, a leading developer of graphics and consumer electronics chips, is expected to roll-out its own bridge solution to allow PCI Express graphics processors to work in AGP systems. The maneuver will reproduce approach of arch-rival nVidia Corp. to set AGP graphics processing units to function with PCI Express x16 systems.
Today Guru3D has reviewed a PowerColor Radeon x800 Pro. The release of nVidia's 6800 series is a strong one and where ATI has been dominate for the past two years, it now has a serious competing product. The series x800 was developed under codename R420 and is lined up against the 6800 series and manages to compete very well. The x800 Pro. A VPU built on a 0.13-micron fabrication process with 160 Million transistors. The Pro product has 12 pixel pipelines opposed to its bigger XT brother with 16. Make no mistake, both products have the same core yet the Pro version has 4 pipes disabled. I already noticed some interesting soft and hardmods on the web to enable these extra 4 pipes. Basically make sure you have the VIVO version and you have a good chance of making it an XT for free. The VPU furthermore has two pixel shader units per pipeline, the pipes are organized into four groups of four, six vertex shader units, four-way crossbar memory controller and 450 MHz Graphics DDR-3 memory.
HotHardware sends word of their Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe review. It seems that high-end graphics cards are always in the lime light upon the initial launch of a new graphics processor architecture from any of the major players. Although there's a limited number of potential consumers, relatively speaking, for these flagship enthusiat-class boards, they pave the way for their more modestly priced siblings, in terms of setting the standard for the base GPU architecture and how it performs versus the competition. We're sure many of you wouldn't think of dropping over $500 for an uber-class 3D card like a GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition or Radeon X800 XT Premium Edition, but there are some who will spare no expense, and these cream-of-the-crop video cards drive stakes in the ground of the fiercely competitive 3D graphics hardware landscape.
We have learned that ATI's R480 will be native PCI Express only and that at least in 2004 you won't see an AGP variation of the card. The R480, ATI's flagship chip, will replace X800XT and X800XT PE and it will be offered in two variations with two different clock speeds.
nVidia will soon introduce a card that will be hidden under the GeForce PCX 6200 marketing name. This card is PCI Express ready, of course, and it is clocked to a 300MHz core and a 500MHz DDR memory. It will come with 128MB of 128 bit memory and will support DVI and TV out, if partners decide that they need that.
Also Gamers-Depot has been taken a look at the Chaintech Apogee AA6800 Turbo Edition. The list of add-in board partners for nVidia GPUs is extremely vast and encompasses a wide variety of companies – all of which seem to build parts aimed at varying geographic locations and demographics. Chaintech, based out of Taiwan, is one such retailer that started making a splash in North America stores a couple of years ago and has built a reputation of offering leading-edge performance at prices that often best its competition.
The GeCube Radeon X800 PRO has been reviewed by Hexus. The generational leap in performance from the old guard, Radeon 9800XT and GeForce FX5950 Ultra, to the new range of Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800 challengers, is massive. You might not notice it that much at 1024x768 with little or no AA and AF applied, but as soon as you crank up the resolution and AA and AF levels, the new boards come live, trouncing the outgoing performance champions by a long long way.
AMDZone has reviewed the Sapphire Radeon
X600 XT 256MB PCIe graphics card. The advanced graphics port first showed up long ago after the bottlenecks of the PCI interface were reached by the first
graphics cards to fully stress the memory bandwidth of the interface. At the time, there was a lot of hype but no real performance difference between the two
but in time the superior AGP interface eventually showed it's worth and became the only interface available for graphics cards until now with native PCI
Express for ATI graphics cards.
ATI's Radeon X600 XT is not too different from the design of their Radeon 9600 XT video card. The card its self
is more the size of a Radeon 9600 PRO and features the smaller fan of that unite.
Well it seems Overclocker Cafe has done a review on the Chaintech GeForce AA6800 Turbo. The GeForce 6800 line as we all know, is broken up into three products; the 6800, the 6800 GT and the 6800 Ultra. Priced at $300, $400 and $500 respectively on average, the entry level 6800 card has gained a lot of attention from those of us not related to Donald Trump. Offering excellent performance across the board, especially in Doom 3, the GeForce 6800 is "the" card to have.
Back in June we reported that ATI was taking the bridging direction with its graphics, and now we have some further proof. ATI hit nVidia very hard for its AGP to PCIe bridge cards but now has decided to button its lip about it. It learned that nVidia made things right as it is already shipping its bridge chip-based cards and passing SIG tests. With this bridge chip you can make PCIe and AGP cards from similar silicon.
Digit-Life has put up a review on the new ATI Radeon X700XT. So, not so much time has passed since the release of the nVidia GeForce 6600 series, and now ATI is announcing its "Canadian answer". The X700 series also comprises several video cards, united by the same codename of the chip - RV410.
We said previously that even though NVIDIA partners overclock their cards to 500/1100MHz, Gainward will go even higher. It's traditionally faster cards will end up with the interesting Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/1960PCX XP "Golden Sample" GLH name where GLH stands for "Goes Like Hell". This card will end up working at a 540MHz+ core and 1200MHz GDDR3 1.6ns memory. It will have 128MB of memory and will go to selected press this week, while end users will be able to get it for €349 next week. An AGP version will be available in early November.
We had a chance to talk to an important nVidia chap who happens to play a very big role in its software department and we learned quite a few things about its coming 65 series driver. We were told that the nVidia 65 series of drivers will end up with WHQL stamp for all of its products. He implied that nVidia driver has to get stamp for all chips from the oldest TNT–TNT2, to the most recent Geforce 6800 Ultra.
ATI's next fastest graphic thing will be based on 0.11µ (micron) architecture. This is the natural direction for ATI to migrate from 0.13µ low K marchitecture to pure 0.11µ without low K. When you make things smaller you can possibly clock a chip even higher, but we don't have any idea what frequency ATI is aiming for. That's exactly where its R480 chip is at this time.
Teamhardware had a look at the new Futuremark's 3DMark05. About the same time last year Futuremark released 3DMark03. Now a year later they've released version 2005. Again this program can help you to measure the 3D performance of your system. Like with the older version the program runs series of tests to come up with a score which you can compare with other systems. When we did a first look at 3DMark03 our test system was somewhat outdated and we couldn't run every test. Now with the Radeon 9600 XT in our system we can run every test albeit not very fast.
PCStats has reviewed the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The nVidia GeForce 6800 GPU is a powerful chip, as are videocards based on it like the Albatron GeForce 6800GT. The 'NV40' GPU is the backbone of the 6800-series, and comes in a couple flavours; 6800 (12 pipe lines), 6800GT (16 rendering pipelines, 350MHz core), 6800 Ultra (16 rendering pipelines, 400MHz core), and the as of yet unavailable 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition (16 rendering pipelines, 450MHz core).
A new version of RivaTuner has been released. The purpose of this utility is to give you access to all the undocumented features of ForceWare and Catalyst Drivers. Drivers have a lot of undocumented registry entries. Some of them don't affect anything, but there are some that are very useful. In general, they cannot give you big Performance Boost but they can improve Image Quality and solve some Compatibility Problems. RivaTuner will help you to change all undocumented registry entries.
A new review at Bjorn3D has seen the daylight. What you will find on our
review bench today is a high-end PowerColor X800 Pro Limited Assassin Edition from Tul. Tul Corporation is a
Tier-1 provider of ATI-based graphic cards.
Tom's Hardware Guide has put up an article on the newest graphic cards. After nearly 10 months, they're back again with an updated version of THG's VGA Charts. This time around, not quite as many new products were launched in 2004. While an abundance of new products flooded the market in 2003, the two market leaders ATI and nVidia held back this year, at least with respect to the number of products launch. At the same time, performance-wise, both graphics processor makers have made great strides with their enthusiast line of products. The performance leap, in fact, was almost desperately needed, as games continue to become more and more demanding with ever-intensifying use of pixel and vertex shaders.
ASUS 8800GT PCIe 512MB - Rev 04
