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Gigabyte Radeon X1800 XL 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Friday, 10 February 2006 |
Viper Lair comes with a review on the Gigabyte Radeon X1800 XL 256MB PCIe graphics card. Video cards are still one of the fastest growing parts of the computer industry. Where CPU speed has slowed down over the past few years, only growing about 50% in the last year or so. However video cards have increased in performance the quite highly with each successive generation. ATIvideo cards are currently considered the lower performance models at this moment, with NVIDIA's latest video cards gaining the preference of many of the enthusiast. ATIhas fairly recently released their latest products, of which some consider at bit too late to match NVIDIA's performance level.
 Gigabyte Radeon X1800 XL 256MB PCI-E Review
So after having looked at all aspects of the card, what is the conclusion? First looking back at the box and the package, what can we say? The box is fairly big, though not quite as big as that of the ASUS Extreme AX800 XL, but still big enough to be noticed on a shelf. The contents of the box are actually pretty good, with the VIVO cable and the component cable being included. The only oddities were the inclusion of a S-VHS to RCA converter as both connections are on the VIVO cable, and the inclusion of only one DVI-VGA converter.
The software bundle was good, with two decent games and some decent video editing software included. Now looking at the card itself, we can see that it has a single slot cooler, that was pretty quiet, as I couldn't hear it over the sound of my water cooling system. Overclocking was a disappointment, as we could only get the core overclocked slightly and couldn't move the RAM even 5MHz even though its rated at higher speeds. Looking at the image quality provided by the card what does this show?
The 2D quality, like most ATI cards was very good, though this card did a little better than other cards. Video in quality is what we expect from the Rage Theater chip, pretty good, but not quite what the Rage Theater 200 can do. Video out quality is where this card has improved in comparison to older ATI cards, as the image is almost as good as the reference image, good job ATI. The 3D quality hasn't changed since the past generation, with 6X AA and 16X ansio being the maximum settings.
Performance was pretty good, as this card could play all the games we threw at it at 1024x768 with 4X AA and 16X ansio without a problem. Playing some other newer games (Age of Empires 3, etc.) provided a smooth frame rate at the settings I tried. In numbers this card, when not CPU limited was between 20% and 50% faster than the older Radeon X800 XL mostly with AA turned on. The ability to enable Shader Model 3.0 features was very nice, and one of the major improvements that ATI put in this generation of cards.
Lastly there is the price of the card. Considering that it is about the same price as the All-In-Wonder X1800 XL card, and its about the same price as comparable Radeon X1800 XL cards this is an interesting product. In all honesty this card isn't as good as the All-In-Wonder card, as that offers the Rage Theater 200 chip and a TV tuner which are major improvements.
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