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PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
Introduction
[ UPDATE: 02/08/04 ] We said we would get our hands on an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra to compare with the Radeon 9800 XT and we never lie (well, we try not to at least!). Thanks to Leadtek, we have been able to test the Leadtek WinFast A380 Ultra TDH MyVIVO (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra). This time around, we used the Catalyst 4.1 and the ForceWare 53.03 drivers to pit the 9800 XT against the 5950 Ultra. We also revised some of our testing strategies and game benchmarks. Check the lower half of each benchmarking and image quality page (pages 9-18) for our latest test results. [ / UPDATE ] The graphics card market has been pretty much narrowed down to the top two contenders, ATI and NVidia. Other companies are starting to show promise for the future, but none match the power of the latest and greatest from these two industry giants. Over the past year, ATI and NVidia have been trying to over take the graphics throne with slight overclocks and improvements on their lines of video cards. While NVidia went from the 5900 to the 5900 Ultra and currently the 5950 Ultra, ATI has gone from the 9800 to the 9800 Pro up to the 9800 XT. Each revision improves slightly upon the previous, but doesn't have enough of a performance increase to warrant an upgrade from a previous revision. Regardless, today we are looking at the Radeon 9800 XT from PowerColor, which is the best of the best from ATI and possibly the best card on the market today (that is until the next generation of ATI cards hits the market in the first half of 2004).   The PowerColor 9800 XT sports a clock speed of 412 MHz, which is a 32 MHz increase from the 9800 Pro, and a memory clock of 730 MHz, which is a 50 MHz increase of the 9800 Pro. The memory interface is still 256-bit which allows for a total memory bandwidth of 23.3GB/sec (just like the 9800 Pro). This 9800 XT, as with every other 9800 XT currently in the market, has 256 MB of memory.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: What's Included & The Card Page 3: Catalyst 3.9 Drivers Part 1 Page 4: Catalyst 3.9 Drivers Part 2 Page 5: Catalyst 4.1 Drivers Page 6: Test Setup / Benchmarking Page 7: Halo Page 8: Unreal Tournament 2003 Page 9: Elite Force 2 Page 10: Splinter Cell Page 11: Need for Speed: Underground Page 12: Call of Duty Page 13: Final Fantasy XI Vana'diel Bench2 Page 14: AquaMark3 Page 15: GunMetal Page 16: Image Quality Page 17: Overclocking / Conclusion 
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Add Comment
6 User Comments 1 - Posted by
jasonwatkins
on January 4, 2004 - 5:39 am Just curious, in the review you didn't state why you used old ATI drivers that are 2 revisions outdated. The current version 3.10's have been out for 2 weeks, but you used version 3.8 (3 months old). Therefore your PQ comparison to nVidia might not be valid since you used the latest nVidia drivers (dated 12/9) against old ATI drivers dated 10/8. Jason 2 - Posted by
A Person
on January 4, 2004 - 2:39 pm 3.8 is older than 3.10?
3 - Posted by
jasonwatkins
on January 4, 2004 - 3:03 pm Yes, ATI has been releasing drivers in this order: 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 (3.ten). The 3.10's are the tenth release in the 3 series. Jason 4 - Posted by
DnD
on January 4, 2004 - 3:15 pm Hey I think I just found what you can get me for my birthday :D
5 - Posted by
Kurtis
on January 4, 2004 - 3:40 pm EDIT: Just figured out what the prob was... We used the 3.9 drivers, and it was a typo in the review. So, in fact, we did not use 3.8, we used 3.9. Sorry for the confusion, review is being updated right now. Also, the 3.10 drivers came out on 12/17, and that was after we had started testing. We will also update the review again as soon as we can get a 5950 Ultra. At that time I will probably retest all the cards, or maybe just the 9800xt and the fx5950 ultra, we'll see. 6 - Posted by
A Person
on January 5, 2004 - 12:23 am Ahh, that makes sense. I cant wait to see the 9800pro and the 5950ultra head to head. Most people just review one or the other, this is gonna be interesting. Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
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