A Closer Look:

The first thing I noticed right out of the box was the heavy duty all metal HSF cooling system. The shroud feels very stable and securely attached to the PCB (Printed Circuit Board). The HSF is dense and rugged while maintaining a single slot size signature. You will not find fancy graphics and fire breathing dragons pictured on the HSF. Instead you will get a very attractive brush stainless steel looking finish as seen below.

VIVO - YPrPb Component Output - Dual Monitor Ready

With full blown 16 parallel pixel pipelines, 6 parallel vertex processing engines, 160 million transistors on a 0.11 micron fabrication process, we are looking at a serious performance card, packing high end features and plenty of horsepower.

The 256-bit quad-channel GDDR3 memory interface, also known as the fat pipe version, allows extremely high performance through extended data output facilitated by 2.0ns GDDR3 modules from Samsung. Dual DVI interconnects allow dual monitors and monitor spanning from both CRT and the latest in digital flat panels.

Allowing such features as high quality integrated video encoder-decoder with digital audio support, high quality TV-out, high quality video-in, the PowerColor X800XL will give excellent video quality and digital vibrancy thanks to this integrated chip. Effectively the ATI Rage Theater off loads the video processing from the CPU of the system by processing the video onboard the ATI Rage Theater processing unit.

ATI RAGE THEATER video encoder converts images of Windows, MAC OS, DVD movies or games into all NTSC and PAL formats for TV viewing. The encoder uses programmable timing to generate high quality TV signals from graphics display modes ranging from 320x200 to 800x600. This provides full support of legacy VGA modes as well as the newer, low-resolution game modes required by Microsoft DirectX.