PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO - Page 18

The Verdict

Quite honestly I was delaying this article pending a driver release from ATI. The press was promised a Crossfire driver for this card (as explained) without the cable. I really wanted to do an article on that. Unfortunately the driver has not been submitted just yet. Ah well ... a standalone review it is :) PowerColor managed to do an awesome job with this product. First off ... their success lies very much in good pricing. This is why you'll notice a somewhat sober software bundle. Hey it's a choice you make as a company. Where do you want to be in the sector is what counts.

None the less the quality of the product is awesome. We had no stability issues whatsoever, the cooler works great as temperatures where not dramatic at all so all in all it's a great product. Personally I really dig the X1800 GTO series as they offer a stack load of fun for the money you have to pay. Products like these you can pickup for roughly 220-250 USD and they guarantee you very decent gameplay and framerates at the best quality in resolution up-to 12x10 and even 16x12 if you enable eye-candy. Now that's not bad at all huh ?

Suffice to say that Powercolor has an an excellent mid-range performer in the market that offers 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.

Yes, 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 just have to life with it.

PowerColor's Radeon X1800 GTO is absolutely worth every penny. Especially considering you can opt it as a Crossfire card without the need for an expensive "primary" mastercard.

This model is 100% reference based up-to the MHz precisely, yet offers nice overclockability to squeeze even more performance out of it. It's an enormously entertaining graphics card and an superbly fine 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 and you'll enjoy it very much.

Highly recommended.