X-bit labs

PowerColor X850 XT and PowerColor X800XL Graphics Cards Review (page 23)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 03/29/2005 | 09:39 AM ]

The second test is more favorable towards NVIDIA’s solutions, but the PowerColor X800 XL is no worse than the GeForce 6800 GT here. The GeForce 6600 GT SLI is still slower than the overclocked PowerColor X850 XT.

The highly efficient memory subsystem helps the PowerColor cards to take the top places in the “eye candy” mode of the second test.

The third test is the most difficult of all, focusing on extremely complex and long pixel shaders. The PowerColor X800 XL is no worse than the GeForce 6800 GT here, although the latter works in the Shader Model 3.0 mode. The two graphics processors clocked at 500MHz couldn’t help the GeForce 6600 GT SLI configuration to take the top place which is occupied by the overclocked PowerColor X850 XT.

The two PowerColors are at least no worse in the “eye candy” mode than the GeForce 6800 GT. That’s a nice result, considering that it comes at low noise and heat dissipation. 3DMark05 makes a wider use of the DirectX 9.0 functions. Particularly, it abounds in complex pixel shaders. That’s why PowerColor’s X800 XL and X850 XT show themselves as quite fast graphics cards in this test suite.