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ATI X800 Pro - Bringing Competition to nVidia 6800 |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 11 November 2004 |
CoolTechZone has
published a review on the ATI
Radeon X800 Pro. The competition between ATI and nVidia is now fiercer than ever. ATI was the leader in the marketplace for over a year, but
with the introduction of next generation of GPUs, nVidia is really starting to
dominate the market. nVidia is
back in the market with full force and ATI is slowly taking the back seat in few of its product
lines, namely it's mid-end graphics card lines.
 ATI X800 Pro - Bringing Competition to nVidia 6800
The performance of the X800 Pro is highly
competitive against nVidia based cards. Chaintech's AA6800 had a 10 percent
advantage over the Gigabyte 6800 and ATI X800 Pro, which explains the leading factor in some tests. ATI's X800 Pro stayed right on tail with Gigabyte's 6800, which is excellent. Even at higher quality settings, numerous games are playable, but if you are playing at 1600x1200, you may want to gain some performance by disabling the AA and AF settings. At such high resolutions, it may be tough to notice the image inconsistencies at certain frames. You may choose to select all high settings in the game instead of just enabling the AA and AF features.
We don't have anything to comment on about the card's performance except that additional on-board memory doesn't have too much impact on the overall performance (6800 = 128MB DDR and ATI X800 Pro = 256MB GDDR3). It does what it's suppose to and does it well. However, we would like to touch up on the accessories part again. ATI's X800 Pro does not come with any bonus accessories that may tempt users to pick ATI's cards over its board partners'. Since the performance of the cards will remain pretty much the same from one board partner to another, it is critical to value the package before making the final choice. Manufacturers need to think about adding additional
software and games in order to make their package better than the rest. Even if they can't increase the bundle side of things, maybe they can lower the prices enough to gain more consumership, but it's not the case with ATI. Ultimately, we highly suggest that ATI put some emphasis on their package.
Overclocking wise, ATI's X800 Pro did excellent
with DRAM speeds, but lagged somewhat when it came to increasing the GPU speeds. Regardless, it easily manages to reach X800 XT speeds without any issues, which
is great. The only difference in performance you will notice after overclocking the card is between 12 pixel pipelines to 16 pixel pipelines.
ATI is currently retailing the card for around $384, which is similar to what its board partners are offering their products for. Is there anything that sets this card from the rest? Unfortunately not! While the performance is excellent and ATI has done a marvelous job with their
X800 series cards, you may want to glance over ATI's board partners for their offerings and better package value.
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