by Alexey Stepin
02/20/2006 | 09:06 AM
The reasons why ATI’s graphics cards of the Radeon X800 series still remain in the market have been given in our earlier reviews. The main of them is that the company has got large amounts of R423, 430 and 480 chips and has to utilize them somehow to avoid loss. However paradoxical it may seem, graphics cards on these chips, limited as they are in functionality, do look better sometimes than same-class models on newer GPUs. They are surely not engaged in the top-end sector struggle where Radeon X1800/X1900 and GeForce 7800 cards contend, but can actually rival such mainstream solutions as GeForce 6800 GS, GeForce 6800 and Radeon X1600 XT, especially as Shader Model 3.0 and HDR aren’t relevant features for this category of graphics hardware due to the relatively low performance they provide in advanced 3D games.
<%BANNER[article]%>Reviewing one of the available versions of ATI Radeon X800 GTO , we noted that working at higher clock rates that graphics card left no chance nearly to the Nvidia GeForce 6800. It also easily beats the Radeon X1600 XT that has only four TMUs, but cannot cope with the overclocker-friendly and technologically advanced GeForce 6800 GS. The 16-pipelined Radeon X800 XL might make a worthy opponent to the latter in terms of performance, but not in terms of price (the official price of the out-dated and technically obsolete Radeon X800 XL is over $200).
PowerColor has made an attempt to change the situation with a release of a new graphics card that would be capable to rival the GeForce 6800 GS in performance as well as in price. The new graphics card, called PowerColor X800 GTO 16, features more active pixel pipelines than the PowerColor X800 GTO has: 16 against 12. The clock rates of these graphics cards are identical, so we seem to deal with nothing else but another implementation of Radeon X800 XL. So, why “GTO 16”, and not “XL”? It’s not probably because ATI Technologies may be upset, but because the name of Radeon X800 GTO is widely recognized among overclockers. Some such cards – those that carry an R480 graphics processor on board – boast excellent overclockability, and the Radeon X800 GTO2 is actually hunted for because it only takes a simple BIOS update to re-enable its deactivated pixel pipelines. So, it’s quite logical for PowerColor to use the GTO suffix in the product name to attract potential customers.
Based on the 0.11-micron R430 GPU, the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 may be considered as a compromise between Radeon X800 GTO and Radeon X800 GTO2. It has more pipelines than the former, but also a somewhat lower overclocking potential than the latter. Let’s have a closer look at it right now.
We have dealt with all versions of packages PowerColor ships its graphics cards in, but this one features an original, new design to create an impression as of a unique product.
Black, gray and white are the colors employed here; red is only used on the ATI Technologies logotypes. The face side of the box has the look of a roughly polished metal. Besides the ATI and PCI Express logos, there’s only the name of the graphics card here, and the number 16 is made on holographic film which shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow. This is the only decoration and it doesn’t look out of place at all. The restrained package design of this kind is typical of unique and high-end products.
The package exterior seems to imply some gorgeous accessories coming with the graphics card, but we found standard things only, namely:
Well, we wouldn’t call these accessories gorgeous, but they are sufficient indeed. You get everything necessary to use the graphics card and you also receive a popular and highly realistic flight sim as a bonus.
The design of the PCB of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 differs somewhat from Radeon X850 XT/X800 XL. The PowerColor X800 GT uses an analogous design, though.
The placement of some capacitors and inductance coils in the top left corner is different. Two switch transistors are missing on the reverse side of the PCB, too. These are not necessary considering the low clock rates and, accordingly, the low power consumption of the card.
There is no video-capture Rage Theater chip on board, but an additional power connector with its accompanying elements is present. We don’t quite grasp PowerColor’s idea here. The X800 GTO 16 has the same parameters as the Radeon X800 XL which does well without external power. Of course, the additional power source may add stability to the card at overclocking, but the heart of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is the R430 chip whose frequency potential is next to zero, so we really can’t find a good reason for that onboard power connector.
Having removed the cooler and a layer of thick dark-gray thermal paste we really saw an R430 chip there:
This chip is dated the fifth week of the last year, i.e. the very end of January, so it is over one year old. We seem to be right supposing large stores of out-dated GPUs at ATI Technologies and its partners. A curious fact, the die is marked as Radeon X800 Pro although such graphics cards were not supposed to be based on the R430. The X800 series on this chip was supposed to consist of two models: the 16-pipelined Radeon X800 XL and the 12-pipelined Radeon X800. The graphics core works at 400MHz; widely employed K4J55323QF-GC20 chips of GDDR3 from Samsung are installed here. The total amount of graphics memory is 256MHz; it is clocked at 490 (980) MHz.
The cooling system of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is exactly like the one installed on the PowerColor X800 GT and PowerColor X800 GTO VIVO. It only lacks the colorful sticker. The cooler consists of a simple aluminum heatsink which is blown at by an axial fan and is covered with an air-directing casing. There are no special technological tricks like heat pipes or something, here.
This cooler did well on the above-mentioned graphics cards from PowerColor, so there’s no reason for it to be incapable of handling the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, too. Besides high cooling efficiency, it also features good noise characteristics. Unfortunately, there is still no thermal interface between the memory chips and the heatsink’s sole, so the memory may overheat, especially at overclocking, if your system case is poorly ventilated.
Well, your overclocking attempts with this graphics card are unlikely to be well rewarded, as it is the case with all R430-based devices, and we don’t think the additional power will have a big positive effect on the result. 450-460MHz is the best we can hope for, and most likely a frequency gain of 30-40MHz is what we’ll get. The memory may be stable at 550 (1100) MHz depending on your luck. We’ll tell you in the next section how lucky we were with our sample of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is equipped with a standard cooler other graphics cards from this manufacturer come with and its noise characteristics are exactly alike (for details see our previous reviews called PowerColor X800 GT Graphics Card Review: Worthy Competitor to NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6800 Meets New Contender: PowerColor X800 GTO VIVO Graphics Card Review ). The card is not absolutely silent, but its noise always remains within comfortable limits. There’s a fan-speed control system on the card, but the fan was working at the same speed through all of our tests.
Overclocking the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 proved an even gloomier task than we had apprehended. Even with additional power attached we couldn’t lift the GPU frequency up higher than 430MHz, our labs’ record with the R430 chip being 480MHz (for details see this article ). We don’t expect much of a performance growth from such a small core frequency gain, of course. The memory did no better, notching 510 (1020) MHz only, although such chips are generally stable at 550-570 (1100-1140) MHz. So, our sample of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 proved to have a paltry overclocking potential. Therefore, it doesn’t suit for the category of users we talked about at the beginning of the review. You may be luckier than us with your sample of the card, but if you are seriously into overclocking, the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is definitely not your choice.
Like all contemporary graphics cards of a high enough class, this one produced a sharp 2D image in all display modes supported by our Dell P1110 and P1130 monitors, up to 1600x1200@85Hz and 1800x1440@75Hz.
For our today’s test session with PowerColor X800 GTO 16 we used the following test platform:
ATI and Nvidia drivers were configured with standard settings that we usually use for testing in our lab:
ATI Catalyst:
Nvidia ForceWare:
Each game was set for the maximum graphics quality similar to ATI Technologies and Nvidia solutions, except Pacific Fighters flight simulator that requires vertex texturing support for work in SM3.0 mode. We didn’t change the configuration files of the test games. We only used the settings options that were offered by the gaming engine. If the game offered integrated benchmarks and allowed recoding and playing back demos and saving the performance data in a file, we would use this feature, if not – we would resort to Fraps utility. We took not only the average performance rates but also the minimal values, if the circumstances allowed that.
If the games allowed managing the full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering we would set FSAA 4x + AF 16x mode with the help of corresponding settings. If there was no possibility to configure the system like that, we would force this mode from the graphics card drivers. If the gaming engine didn’t support FSAA, we didn’t run the tests in eye candy mode at all. Since PowerColor X800 GTO 16 didn’t have any overclocking potential to play with, we decided not to run the tests for the overclocked graphics card, because the small increase in the GPU and memory frequency like that would hardly affect the gaming performance at all.
We did not include the results for Radeon X800 XL: the thing is that Radeon X800 XL and PowerColor X800 GTO 16 run at the same performance level. In fact, it is not surprising at all, because the technical specifications of these cards are similar. Besides PowerColor X800 GTO 16 there were the following testing participants in our today’s race:
We tested our graphics cards in the following games:
First-person 3D Shooters :
Third-person 3D Shooters :
Simulators :
Strategies :
Semi-synthetic benchmarks:
Synthetic benchmarks :
The Radeon X800 architecture has spent its reserves and doesn’t look well anymore in games that abound in advanced shader-based effects. The 16-pipelined card from PowerColor can only challenge the GeForce 6800 GS in 1600x1200 with or without full-screen antialiasing. It is slower, sometimes much slower, than the Nvidia card in all the other cases.
At the “eye candy” settings and in low resolutions the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is also slower than the Radeon X1600 XT although the latter has only four texture-mapping units (TMUs – the X800 GTO 16 has as many as 16!). Talking about playability, the PowerColor card delivers a comfortable average frame rate in 1280x1024 without full-screen antialiasing and in 1024x768 with FSAA and anisotropic filtering turned on.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 can only keep on the same level with the GeForce 6800 in this game – the GeForce 6800 with slower memory than recommended by Nvidia. The game is playable in 1024x768 resolution only, without full-screen antialiasing. These results are not to be wondered at because the OpenGL-using game engine that makes wide use of stencil shadows has a strong predilection towards Nvidia’s GeForce 6/7 cards.
The game engine built by Infinity Ward supports dynamic lighting and shadows, effects, normal maps, advanced smoke and other shader-based effects. The 16 pixel processors of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 cope well enough with this abundance of shaders, although the frame rate is hardly comfortable even in 1024x768. The card wins the “pure speed” mode of the test, but as soon as we enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering, it gives in and rolls back almost to the very last position. We don’t know how to explain this. The problem might be similar to what we have already seen in Serious Sam 2, when the ATI Catalyst driver cannot distribute the video memory resources efficiently.
It’s like in The Chronicles of Riddick and the reasons are the same: the game engine uses the OpenGL API and renders dynamic stencil shadows GeForce 6/7 cards are efficient with, being capable of processing a double number of Z values per clock cycle. Intensive use of the Z-buffer is the key point of this shadows-rendering method and the UltraShadow II technology all modern GeForce cards support comes in very handy here.
The performance of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is sufficient for 1024x768 resolution only. You’ll have to reduce the level of detail to play comfortably in higher resolutions.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 (and Radeon X800 XL) is on a par with the GeForce 6800 GS in this test. The former is a little faster in the “eye candy” mode thanks to its efficient memory controller whereas the latter feels better at the “pure speed” settings. In either case the gap between the cards is never bigger than 3-5fps. Both the cards make all resolutions playable in the “pure speed” mode and allow to play the game with comfort in 1280x1024 with enabled full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.
The GeForce 6 family has a generally higher performance than the Radeon X800 series in this scene due to SM3.0 support. The gap is getting smaller as we switch to higher resolutions and turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, yet the GeForce 6800 GS is still a little ahead of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 even in the hardest test mode. Note that the Radeon X1600 XT, also with 12 pixel processors, cannot match the GeForce 6800 GS, as it is limited by having only four texture-mapping units.
First Encounter Assault Recon is among the most demanding games of today, and high resolutions are only available to owners of top-end graphics cards. The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 cannot count among such, so you should launch the game in 1024x768 on this card as well as on the GeForce 6800 GS.
The PowerColor card takes the lead in the “eye candy” mode, probably due to its efficient memory controller, but its performance is insufficient for comfortable play.
Half-Life 2 is quite an easy test for today’s graphics cards, so owners of a PowerColor X800 GTO 16 or Radeon X800 XL card may be sure of an average frame rate of near 50fps even in 1600x1200 with turned-on FSAA and anisotropic filtering. The 16 TMUs make the PowerColor card the leader among the participating devices. The GeForce 6800 GS roughly corresponds to the Radeon X800 GTO in the “eye candy” mode and the Radeon X1600 XT performs poorly as it can’t cope with the large textures the world of Half-Life 2 abounds in.
In the pre mode PowerColor X800 GTO 16 outperforms both: GeForce 6800 GS as well as Radeon X1600 XT, however its performance is still too low to be considered acceptable for comfortable gaming in any of the standard resolutions. When we shift to eye candy mode, GeForce 6800 GS and our today’s hero switch places. This is probably cause by the fact that PowerColor X800 GTO 16 cannot boast high performance during texture-rich pixel shaders processing.
The scenes of this shooter operate with a few rather simple pixel shaders at a time, so the number of ALUs plays no big role. The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is but one step ahead of the Radeon X800 GTO and even finds itself behind it in one instance, although provides a bigger min frame rate, 69fps against 58fps. The speed of execution of such simple shaders is important, however, and this is why the GeForce 6800 GS climbs up to the top place, although even this graphics card cannot yield an acceptable frame rate in 1600x1200.
The Radeon X800 GTO is no match to the GeForce 6800 GS, but the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 makes a worthy opponent thanks to the active fourth quad of pixel processors. More such processors mean more pixel shaders executed simultaneously and this proves to be enough for a win. The player cannot use only 1600x1200 resolution at the “eye candy” settings.
Shaders from Serious Sam 2 work actively with textures, some shaders with as many as 7-8 textures. This is why the main performance-limiting factor for the Radeon X1600 XT is the insufficient number of TMUs. That explanation doesn’t work for the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, however, which performs poorly, too. As we already wrote, this problem may result from inefficient graphics memory distribution in the ATI Catalyst driver as it doesn’t show up with senior graphics card models from the Radeon X1000 family equipped with 512MB of memory. On the other hand, even the two times faster GeForce 6800 GS delivers a mere 48fps in 1024x768 with a minimum of 19-20fps. We are afraid owners of this graphics card will have to reduce the game quality settings, too.
As always, the speed ceiling goes lower for graphics cards on GPUs from ATI Technologies in Unreal Tournament 2004. It doesn’t prevent the PowerColor card from yielding over 70fps in 1600x1200 with turned-on FSAA and anisotropic filtering, though. This is more than enough to enjoy this still quite popular 3D shooter.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is slower than the Radeon X800 GTO in 1024x768 resolution. In higher resolutions these two cards deliver the same performance, indicating that the number of pixel processors isn’t crucial here. Their efficiency and operating frequency are more relevant to the graphics card performance as the results of the GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6800 GS suggest. On the other hand, there’s no worrying about the game speed on the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 as it never sinks below 58fps which is more than enough for a third-person-view shooter.
We can’t directly compare the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and the GeForce 6800 GS as they are working in different modes, SM2.0 and SM 3.0, respectively. Anyway, the new card from PowerColor turns in a good result for its class, making 1280x1024 resolution playable at the “pure speed” settings. It is even in the lead in the “eye candy” mode, but we should not forget that like all Radeon X800 cards, the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 provides a somewhat worse image quality in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory than GeForce 6/7 do (the HDR implementation on X800 cards uses int16 format as opposed to fp16, which is employed on GeForce 6/7 and Radeon X1000).
The game abounds in simple pixel shaders and prefers graphics cards with many pixel processors on board. Although the GeForce 6800 GS overtakes the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 in high resolutions, the latter still ensures a playable frame rate in both the test modes, perhaps except for 1600x1200 resolution at the “eye candy” settings – after all, simulators require as smooth game performance as shooters with first-person view.
Maddox Games created the game engine for their flight simulators with Nvidia’s graphics solutions in mind. As a result, the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, just like any other Radeon for that matter, has no chance for a win over the same-class solution from Nvidia. In this case the difference is not just big, it is huge, sometimes amounting to 100% and more. With a min speed of 25fps and an average speed of 50-52fps, the game is barely playable in 1024x768.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 looks well in the “pure speed” mode and is just brilliant at the “eye candy” settings. In the former case it is no slower than the GeForce 6800 GS and in the latter case it gains an overwhelming victory. This performance doesn’t seem so spectacular, though, when you recall that the new graphics card from PowerColor does not support Shader Model 3.0 and does not provide as high image quality as the GeForce 6800 GS does. Well anyway, you get an acceptable frame rate in 1024x768 resolution only.
The higher GPU frequency and the support of UltraShadow II technology put the GeForce 6800 GS on top in this test, but the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 does well, too, making all the resolutions playable in the “pure speed” mode. In the “eye candy” mode the speed of the PowerColor may bottom out to below 25fps, yet its average performance is rather high, at least for 1024x768.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and the GeForce 6800 GS have the same “pure speed” in this test. The former profits by its 6 vertex processors and hierarchal Z-buffer, while the latter has a higher core clock rate and the ability to process a double number of Z values per clock cycle. It’s generally all the same at the “eye candy” settings, but the PowerColor is slightly ahead of the GeForce 6800 GS in higher resolutions due to the more advanced memory controller architecture.
This test doesn’t produce a clear picture of the performance of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 (and Radeon X800 XL). The Final Fantasy XI engine is obviously indifferent to the number of pixel processors because the 16-pipelined PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is as fast as the 12-pipelined Radeon X800 GTO here. The GeForce 6800 GS suffers defeat, probably as it has fewer vertex processors.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 brings about a nice performance boost over the ordinary Radeon X800 GTO, yet this is not enough to overtake the GeForce 6800 GS, which is better suited to the conditions of the first three 3DMark03 tests.
The first test uses fixed-function T&L only, so the GeForce 6800 GS wins expectedly. The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 only gets closer to its opponent in 1600x1200 with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering.
The results of the second test are roughly similar to the first one, except that the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, which doesn’t have any technologies to accelerate stencil shadows rendering but does have a higher-performing memory controller, overtakes the GeForce 6800 GS a little earlier, in 1280x1024 resolution at the “eye candy” settings.
The standings are the same here, but the more complex geometry of the third test suits somewhat better for the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and it catches up with the GeForce 6800 GS in the “pure speed” mode already.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 prefers 1280x1024 resolution for some reason in the fourth test. Its advantage over the GeForce 6800 GS is the biggest then. In other cases the advantage is small or zero, but the PowerColor is on average faster in this test than its Nvidia counterpart.
So, the overall 3DMark03 scores are well deserved as the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is slower than the GeForce 6800 GS in three tests out of four and is comparable to it in the fourth test. But if the total score was calculated using the “eye candy” results, these two graphics cards would probably have similar scores.
3DMark05 has it in a different way: the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and the GeForce 6800 GS have roughly the same performance and are both slower than the Radeon X1600 XT which is better suited to execute math1ematics-heavy pixel shaders.
The GeForce 6800 GS and the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 have similar “pure speeds”, but the PowerColor card suddenly sinks to the third place, after the Radeon X1600 XT, as soon as we turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering despite the awful difference in the number of their TMUs (16 against 4). We can’t find a good explanation to that. The memory controller in the R430 chip is less advanced than in the RV530, but more efficient than the memory controller in the NV42 chip. Judging by the results, it is all about the efficiency of pixel processors as they are executing difficult code with complex-texture lookups. The Radeon X1600 XT is hamstringed by its 4 TMUs and the GeForce 6800 GS uses this handicap to the full.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 behaves differently in the second test where it gets the first place in the “pure speed” mode and is as fast as the GeForce 6800 GS at the “eye candy” settings. This is probably the result of the overall compactness of the test which doesn’t include too many open scenes with complex textures. The Radeon X1600 XT isn’t far behind the leader, thus indicating that scenes like these don’t require too many TMUs.
The third test offers both math1ematical and textural load to the graphics card. Not limited by its four TMUs, the Radeon X1600 would probably be far ahead of the PowerColor X800 GTO and the Radeon X800 XL. As it is, the X1600 delivers the same performance as the mentioned cards. The GeForce 6800 GS has everything aplenty – texture-mapping units, efficient pixel shader processors and high clock rates – and it looks well across all the resolutions.
So, the results of the separate tests agree with the overall scores. But unlike in 3DMark03, the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 would have a smaller overall score than the GeForce 6800 GS if the “eye candy” results were counted in because it is slower at executing shaders with complex-texture lookups.
The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 belongs to the Radeon X800 family and doesn’t support Shader Model 3.0, so there are no results of the appropriate 3DMark06 tests.
The higher level of detail of 3DMark06’s scenes and the lack of SM3.0 support affect the results of the Radeon X800 architecture here. The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 looks quite well in the earlier versions of the benchmark, but 3DMark06 puts it down on the same level with the GeForce 6800 which has much more humble characteristics but can pass both the SM3.0/HDR tests.
The GeForce 6800 GS deservedly enjoys the highest overall score. It is closely followed by the Radeon X1600 XT which works well with complex pixel shaders and scores a mere 111 points less although this graphics card from ATI has three times less TMUs than the GeForce 6800 GS has.
Analyzing the results of the SM2.0 tests separately, we can see that the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 doesn’t do so very bad. Here, it only scores 66 points less than the Radeon X1600 XT and 231 points more than the GeForce 6800.
Here, we are not as much surprised that the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is slower than the GeForce 6800 GS as that it is also slower than the Radeon X1600 XT. The scene being very large, the latter card with its only four TMUs should have done worse. We can’t see anything like that, though, and the Radeon X1600 XT is confidently ahead of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 in all the modes and resolutions.
The second SM2.0 graphics test resembles the second game test from 3DMark05 but features a more complex lighting model. The standings are different as a result: the GeForce 6800 GS has the highest “pure speed”, but the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and the Radeon X1600 XT share the top place in the “eye candy” mode.
Like in the two previous versions of 3DMark, the overall scores of the participating graphics cards are confirmed by the results of the separate tests.
Well, we have just tested PowerColor X800 GTO 16 graphics card positioned by the manufacturer as an inexpensive 16-pipeline graphics solution that can compete with GeForce 6800 GS. Has this product succeeded in its task?
Having studied the obtained testing results we can state that in some cases PowerColor X800 GTO 16 does outperform GeForce 6800 GS and sometimes this performance difference is quite big. However, the competitor is still leading in most games. Moreover, in some games, such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Age of Empires 3, you can now get much better image quality due to Shader Model 3.0 support, which is unfortunately unavailable for solutions based on Radeon X800 architecture. And PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is one of these solutions. In fact it differs from Radeon X800 XL only by the name and pricing. And unfortunately, we have to admit that the time of Radeon X800 architecture is little by little passing by.
As for the positioning for hardware enthusiasts, the situation is also twofold. On the one hand, an inexpensive graphics card with 16 pixel pipelines looks pretty attractive, and you will not need to mess around with unblocking the additional 4 pipelines like in case of Radeon X800 GTO2. On the other hand, this baby will never become as popular as Radeon X800 GTO2 on R480 GPU, because of the low overclocking potential and higher price point. Note that at the same time, GeForce 6800 GS overclocks pretty well and has much more promising future than PowerColor X800 GTO 16 thanks to such prospective technologies as Shader Model 3.0, HDR, PureVideo, etc. So, in case of comparable pricing it looks like Nvidia’s solution will still look as a better buy.
As for the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 graphics card itself, it made a pretty good impression, although we didn’t discover any specific features that would be typical of this only model: everything is pretty standard for the graphics cards from this maker. The only thing I would like to specifically stress is the great package design: PowerColor X800 GTO 16 box does look very stylish.
I have to confess that we were slightly puzzled by the second power supply connector, because it is not really needed as the features of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 are absolutely identical to those of Radeon X800 XL. As for overclocking, it is also hardly needed there as well: additional power supply didn’t affect the overclocking potential of the graphics card based on R430 GPU at all. However, I cannot say that having an extra power supply connector is a drawback as well.
So, if we would prefer the ATI solution in case of Radeon X800 GTO against GeForce 6800, then in our today’s situation when we have PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and GeForce 6800 GS, the preferences will stay with ATI’s rival. The reasons are the higher overall performance as well as more promising future prospects.
Highs:
Lows: