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PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Zombie
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Thursday, 01 June 2006 |
X-Bit Labs shares a review on the PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCIe graphics card. Today we are going to introduce to you the ATI Radeon X1800 GTO graphics solution that tends to be called the best from the $199-249 price range. The newcomer has every reason to claim this prestigious title, it features 256-bit memory bus and is built on the advanced R520 GPU with the limited number of units. How tense the battle between Radeon X1800 GTO and GeForce 7600 GT is going to be? The newcomer will be represented by PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO. NVIDIA announced its landmark G70 graphics processor and claimed technological superiority. ATI's R520 made a tardy appearance but didn't put the company back in the lead.
 PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO 256MB PCI-E Review
But let's get back to the R520. As we said, this chip didn't become an unrivalled leader despite the number of progressive architectural innovations it embodied in silicon. The performance of the best solution on that GPU, Radeon X1800 XT 512MB, was overall higher than that of the GeForce 7800 GTX, but the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB released later on proved to be faster still, and stronger in the end. And although NVIDIA couldn't provide that card in mass quantities, ATI Technologies should have felt very disturbed at its lost technological superiority.
The response from ATI Technologies to NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GT appeared quite a success and didn't require too much struggle and effort, the unused resources of the R520 and the already existing PCB layout gave birth to a new mainstream solution featuring excellent list of specifications and high performance. And ATI didn't have to develop anything from scratch. The new Radeon X1800 GTO showed its real best in the same applications where Radeon X1800/X1900 based solution have always been strong, i.e. in games requiring fast pixel shader performance especially with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing.
The latter effect is very demanding to the memory subsystem, and such feature as 256-bit memory bus width of the newcomer played a very important role here. GeForce 7600 GT with its 128-bit memory bus simply couldn't compete with the Radeon X1800 GTO here. As usual, ATI's solution yielded to its opponent in OpenGL games or those gaming applications that were optimized for GeForce 6/7 architecture. Besides, the Radeon X1800 GTO turned out to be very modest when it came to power consumption, only 48W under full workload. But what about the cooling solution?
Well, it also boasted acceptable level of noise thanks to a new more efficient cooling solution than the one used on Radeon X1800 XL, and excellent overclocking potential. Especially I terms of GPU overclocking. The latter is actually not surprising at all, because the R520 was initially designed to work at frequencies over 625MHz. Although a lot of chips didn't go through the frequency sort-out procedure, they can still run at a much higher rate than the 500MHz nominal frequency set for the Radeon X1800 GTO, which certainly ensures a significant performance boost.
The overclocking potential of Radeon X1800 GTO is slightly held back by the slower graphics memory with 2.0ns access time. However, since this memory communicates with the GPU via the 256-bit memory bus, it still ensures higher bandwidth than the memory subsystem of GeForce 7600 GT. The more efficient Ringbus memory controller than the one from NVIDIA also contributes to higher memory subsystem bandwidth. Of course, the Radeon X1800 is not absolutely flawless. In particular, it has a much more overloaded PCB than that of GeForce 7600 GT and requires additional power supply.
Also remember that the production cost of the Radeon X1800 GTO is quite high because of the more complex PCB layout that has been initially developed for more expensive solutions. Less options for price reduction, this is the price ATI had to pay for releasing a new mainstream graphics card without much trouble. At the same time, the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT is based on a very simple PCB design and uses a special GPU, so its price may drop down quicker and hence the Radeon X1800 GTO may lose its attraction for the end-user in the long run.
The Radeon X1800 GTO is going to be replaced with the new ATI RV570 based solutions, so we wouldn't really worry about the shortage of R520 chips. But in the meanwhile, this graphics card deserves the title of the best solution within $199-249 price range. Speaking of the particular Radeon X1800 GTO graphics card from PowerColor, I would like to say the following. This graphics card follows the reference design precisely and is a great choice for those who do not hunt for rich accessories bundle and are not willing to pay extra for included games.
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