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VisionTek Xtasy Radeon X800XT Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 10 November 2004 |
3DVelocity has published a review on the VisionTek Xtasy Radeon X800XT. So... progress marches forward and Moore's law holds true. There have been leaps and bounds made in virtually all aspects of PC components from CPU architecture to RAM speeds and timings. This time, however, graphics cards have made quite a giant leap forward. New architectures allow huge performance boosts with very little increase in clock speeds. Doubling up on pipelines and introducing new shader engines has proven successful on both fronts (ATI and nVidia). As gamers and enthusiasts we get to reap the benefits of this battle for the graphics crown.
 VisionTek Xtasy Radeon X800XT Review
Well, what can I say... This is one fast, able card with plenty of overclocking room. I replaced the standard paste with GEIL copper based stuff, but I am pretty sure that you could get a few more MHz out of the core with a beefier cooler (if you felt the need). Games today are sporting some serious effects, so if you want to play them as the developers intended, you need serious horsepower. Even so, the testbed here is CPU limited for this title. Of course you have to be pretty hardcore to drop almost $500 on a graphics card, so you probably will shell out the cash for an AthlonFX to go with it...
This is a pretty serious card. It should handle your gaming needs for a couple of years to come. However $479 is a pretty large chunk of change to drop on a video card (but high-performance does come with a hefty price tag sometimes). As I said, for the mainstream user, this card would be an investment in the future of your machine (provided AGP slots hang around for a while longer), 256MB of GDDR3 probably won't hit the bottom of the "minim system requirements" anytime soon, nor is Pixel Shader 3 on the horizon for next month. So, the mainstream user could rest assured that their money was well spent in "futureproofing". As far as quality of build, and performance I see no reason to recommend this card to anyone out there, but if you consider yourself a mainstream user, I might have to ask if the investment is really worth it.
For those hardcore gamers out there, this is one of the fastest, most capable cards on the market today. I don't know what else to say. The minimalist bundle and packaging keeps cost lower than they could be, and the performance gains from overclocking push this card over spec for its older brother (the Platinum Edition). Most of what got benchmarked today doubled the performance of the FX5900. While a significant lead was expected, double was a pleasant surprise (and a multiplier of 5 on 3DMark05). All I can really say is that the VisionTek Xtasy X800XT rocks.
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