MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
$500 SMACKDOWN
This is the price category in which ATI suffers
most over the delay in shipping its neXt-gen-
eration 220. We had to pit ATI’s aging top-
of-the-line 80 8T Platinum %dition against
n6idia’s second-tier 'e&orce 00 'T.ATI RADEON X850 XT PLATINUM EDITION
This board earned the distinction of being “the
fastest videocard we’ve ever tested—by a hair”
back in February of this year, but that wasn’t
enough to earn it a Kick Ass rating. In fact, itmustered just an 8 verdict.
And compared with BFG’s GeForce 7800
GT OC, ATI’s Platinum Edition looks more
like tin. With a street price $60 higher than its
rival, the ATI board managed to post a slightly
better benchmark score in just one game: Far
Cry. The 7800 GT-based card pummeled it on
every other test. But then, that’s pretty much
what we expected to see when this 16-pipe
card entered the ring against the 20-pipe
contender. Sure, the ATI has higher clock
speeds—a 547MHz core and GDDR3 mem-
ory that whizzes along at 594MHz—but
that wasn’t nearly enough to overcome the
BFG’s four extra pipes.BFG GEFORCE 7800 GT OC
If, as we suspect, ATI was knocked back
on its heels when nVidia both announced
and shipped the GeForce 7800 GTX on
the same day, the company must really be
reeling from nVidia’s next punch: the less-
expensive, nearly as powerful GeForce
7800 GT.
The GeForce 7800 GT is almost identi-
cal to the GeForce 7800 GTX, but it has
four fewer pixel pipelines (20 versus 24)
and slower clock speeds. The “OC” in thisimplementation, however, stems from BFG’s
decision to overclock the board’s GDDR
memory and graphics core to 525- and
425MHz, respectively, compared with nVidia’s
reference-design specs of 500- and 400MHz.
Drop a pair of these in an SLI-capable moth-
erboard and you’ll get Doom 3 at 1600x
resolution with 4x antialiasing blasting out
of your monitor at 81.2 frames per second.
That’s Kick Ass performance in our book.$400 ALTERCATION
&or around 400, videocard performance
starts to become interesting to hardcore
gamers. In the waKe of n6idia’s introduction
of the 'e&orce 00 'T, it’s also the point at
which prices are most volatile.XFX GEFORCE 6800GT
As we were going to press, the street pric-
es for GeForce 6800 and 6800 GT boards
were plummeting. XFX just announced a
$50 mail-in rebate for this board, taking
its street price into the under-$300 range.
Being a performance-oriented bunch of
folks, we generally favor performance over
price, but given the huge delta in street
prices between this board and Sapphire’s
slightly faster Radeon X850 XT, and look-
ing at the narrow differences in perfor-
mance, we have to give the nod to XFX’s
GeForce 6800GT.
Besides, we know the XFX board will
run in SLI mode today (in fact, in SLI,
it spanked a single, highly overclocked
Extreme N7800 GTX Top on page 30). Who
knows when ATI customers will be able to
harness a pair of X850 XTs?SAPPHIRE 100103-RD RADEON
X850 XT
If Sapphire had sent its X850 XT board
that’s outfi tted with one VGA and one
DVI port, it would have fi t our under-$
price point. This dual-DVI version increas-
es the card’s cost to $440! But consider-
ing that it was 1.9fps slower than XFX’s
much cheaper GeForce 6800GT playing
Doom 3, and only 9.6fps faster with FarCry, we don’t consider it a good value at
either price point.
The faster-clocked Sapphire board (we
clocked its core at 533MHz and its GDDR
memory at 554MHz) requires an unappeal-
ing two-slot cooler. We were also disap-
pointed with ATI’s MPEG-2 decoding. This
GPU performed better than ATI’s lower-end
chips, but it remains inferior to all the nVidia
solutions we tested. If you’re craving VIVO
for video-editing exploits, on the other hand,
the X850XT will punch your ticket. The XFX
board offers only TV-out.ATI RADEON X850 XT PE
6
$480, http://www.ati.comBFG GEFORCE 7800 GT OC
$420, http://www.bfgtech.com9
MA XIMUMPC
KICKASSSAPPHIRE X850 XT
5
$440, http://www.sapphiretech.comXFX GEFORCE 6800GT
8
$345, http://www.xfxforce.comVIDEOCARD SHOWDOWN