This product was 100% aimed against bith the GeForce 6800 GS and 7600 GT , much like these cards I like this Radeon X1800 GTO very much. The performance we see for this product really is fantastic for a mid range product. Let's catch the bull by the horns straight away, there's one downside .. this card has roughly equal performance as that 7600 GT (in most scenarios a tad faster though) yet is 50 bucks more expensive. So that's a little bit of a bummer, but I got a hunch that the actual e- and retail prices might be better and thus even more attractive.

But hey, there are people that like an ATI product and an equal amount of people that prefer an NVIDIA product. Suffice to say that both camps now have an excellent mid-range performer in the product line up that I can absolutely applaud. Enough of the comparing among the two though. What ATI offers you here is seriously good performance for your bucks. Pretty much all games can be played at really good resolutions, you are no longer bound to a 1024x768 resolution in this mid-range segment of products.

Some examples have to be F.e.a.r which at 1280x1024 was still pushing an average framerate of 37 FPS with 4xAA and 8xAF. And for that title that's exceptionally good performance. What about Splinter Cell 3 Chaos Theory ... 1280x1024 with 16 levels of anisotropic filtering enabled and HDR active pushed an average framerate of 43 FPS, again that's just really good.

So it's suffice to say that the X1800 GTO in the mid-range segment is a winner for sure. Of course it's not all about gaming anymore with today's graphics cards. With the X1800 GTO comes X1000 family features. Among it AVIVO, and I just have to state that ever since ATi released the Catalyst 5.13 driver in late 2005 the output/decoding quality of graphics card decoded media files (and especially high definition content) was taken to extremely nice quality. The HQV benchmark proofs it very well, that remains to be a subjective test though but yeah .. image quality is just exceptionally good.

For what is matters, Image quality as always is extremely good with ATI product. They just do not compromise at it and next to that I just have to mention that even with the Beta driver we had to all games just where looking marvelous. In our conclusion we always say a thing or two about stability as ATI has come a long way with driver development. Their driver reputation is still haunting them and therefore I'm glad to report that we did not have one driver issue or a crash whatsoever. Okay .. so I'm still not a fan of the memory hog that is called the Catalyst Control panel but I'll justy have to life with it.

So in retrospect I'm happy to report to you that the Radeon X1800 GTO is absolutely worth every penny. It's an extremely fun card and an exceptionally good choice for those gamers who play their games at 1280x1024. Yeah, a good product, very decent performance, acceptable price and a heap of functionality. It's definitely a product worth considering if you are in the market for a sub 249 USD mid-range product.

Cards like these .. bring em' on. It was a pleasure to give it a quick test spin.