Gigabyte Radeon X1800XL Review @ AMDZone

Regeneration · Posted by Regeneration on January 12th, 2006, 10:36 AM

As we all know last year ATI faced a number of big setbacks in the graphics world, first with Crossfire being pushed back months and months from when they first stated it would launch, then a paper launch with no product, and finally R520 also seeing a number of delays it finally had a nice launch late last year and as we've shown previously, does perform very well. Things seem to finally be turning around for the company and their next generation of graphics card technoogy could possibly let them fully reclaim the lead but for now the R520 is out and doing excellently. Previously we looked at Asus X1800 XL and today we have another from one of their competitors, Gigabyte, with the long winded product name of GV-RX18L256V-B, otherwise their take on ATI's X1800 XL.

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**Posted by Cool Barn on January 12th, 2006, 01:58 PM**

Sigh ... Yet another video card review filled to the brim with benchmarks but not much else.

They compared the speed of the XL against two other cards plus a Crossfire setup, but where were the IQ comparisons?
Perhaps some screenshots?
Perhaps some comments or testing of AVIVO and ATI's implementation of SM3.0 rather than just mentioning it in passing?
Maybe mention how stable the card was - were there any crashes, artifacts, or any other issues whilst testing?
Overall how smoothly did the card run compared to its direct competitor the 7800GT?

Now that my bitching is out of the way the card itself looks very nice. ATI obviously have been putting plenty of work into their drivers over the last few months, because the first (p)reviews I read of the X1800XL saw it getting bested by the 7800GT, but now it seems to be ahead in most of the benchmarks. Add this to the Radeon's arguably superior IQ and ATI now seem to be on to a winner - shame it has taken so long.