ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire

Reviews

Posted on 13 / 11 / 2006

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The X1800 Series of cards is ATI's latest attempt to compete with Nvidia's Geforce 7800 GTX. The price and performance have been designed for the extreme PC gamer. The 3D architecture and Shader Model 3.0 utilizes ATI’s revolutionary Avivo for video and display performance. The X1800 comes in two forms, a standard version and a CrossFire Edition. The CrossFire series aims to compete SLI technology, where you can connect two cards for increased performance. ATI initially scoffed at SLI, claiming gamers wouldn't pay for two cards. This has caused ATI to play catch-up, with their dual-graphics technology being delayed by months. ATI claim the CrossFire cards are more flexible than SLI: because you can mix and match board vendors with CrossFire. However until the release of the the CrossFire series has been over showered by SLI due to availability and high resolution limits. The Old CrossFire X850 release being a damp squid. So how will the it compare with the 7800 GTX?, for one thing ATI has rectified the resolution issue, the X1800 GT provides resolutions of up to 2560x1600 and the DVI bandwidth has been doubled. The X1800 also supports ATI’s new transparency AA feature and Smoothvision HD anisotropic filtering. Cooling shouldn't be a problem with the massive dual-slot cooler. When fitting two cards today together the space between them is just a few millimeters, but with the dual-slot coolers the air comes from the side. Therefore cooling shouldn't be a problem with a dual card setup. Just make sure not to block the side of the cards. Benchmark indicate the X1800 performed slightly better the 7800 GTX 512MB on a few of the latest games such as HL2. The 7800 was performing better for F.E.A.R and Quake 4 however. The X1800 is ATI’s second-generation CrossFire solution, and a big improvement over it's predecessor. The card also retails for around £50 less than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. Currently we would say the Crossfire is still playing catch-up with SLI. The 7800 also seems to have a slight edge in benchmark tests. But the differences are minuscule, and with future driver releases ATI may increase the performance levels of the X1800 GT.

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User - MikeD