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PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 26 April 2006 |
Elite Bastards comes with a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCIe graphics card. On the very same day that NVIDIA launched its new mid-range part during this year's CeBIT show in Hannover, the GeForce 7600 GT, ATI managed to irritate some by soft launching a part to compete with NVIDIA in this price range. At that time, their Radeon X1800 GTO part was unavailable in retail, wasn't scheduled to be for several weeks, and only a handful of review sites had parts available to preview. Fast forwarding on to the present day, and thankfully Radeon X1800 GTO boards are now on store shelves and readily available.
 PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCI-E Review
Looking at PowerColor's Radeon X1800 GTO in isolation, you have an impressive product for under £200, good performance, and an absolutely top notch feature set make this board an exciting proposition. If you're keen to game with anti-aliasing enabled at this price point, then there can be little doubt that the Radeon X1800 GTO holds an advantage over the GeForce 7600 GT in this discipline, winning out time and time again on the performance front. However, the Radeon X1800 GTO does carry one rather large piece of baggage with it, its price.
PowerColor have sensibly opted to keep the supplied bundle with this board to a minimum in order to keep the price down, but its retail price still comes in some way above even extreme versions of the GeForce 7600 GT boards, with higher clocked core and memory to take its performance closer to the Radeon X1800 GTO levels, even with anti-aliasing enabled. Add in to that the fact that the Radeon X1800 GTO requires external power where the GeForce 7600 GT doesn't, and a quieter cooling solution on the NVIDIA based parts, and suddenly what may have seemed a simple decision becomes that much more difficult.
So, at the end of the day, it comes down to two things. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, money. Do you have an extra £20 or £30 laying around to consider a Radeon X1800 GTO over the GeForce 7600 GT? If you do, then it comes down to the second point... What you want from your game playing experience. If you're happy gaming without anti-aliasing, the GeForce 7600 GT is for you. With anti-aliasing enabled, the Radeon X1800 GTO is the more tempting of the two parts. Beyond that, it comes down purely to the features available on the two boards.
If you fancy making use of floating-point blending based High Dynamic Range rendering along with anti-aliasing, then the Radeon X1800 GTO is literally the only way to go. Similarly, if anisotropic filtering without any angle dependency is important to you, then the Radeon X1800 GTO has what you need. If you can live without those features however, your choice is far more open, and right now a GeForce 7600 GT based board is looking just that little bit more tempting.
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