reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
MARCH 2006 MA XIMUMPC
CrossFire depends on this hydra-like cable to
communicate with the second GPU in the system.
A compositing chip on the master card combines
the renders from each card and sends the final
image to the monitor.$600, http://www.ati.comX1800 XT CROSSFIRE EDITIONDUAL EXHAUST
Provides a solid upgrade
path for X1800 owners. ATI
makes overclocking nearly
foolproof.
EXHAUST FUMES8
The CrossFire cables are a pain,
and the cards aren’t nearly as fast
as those based nVidia’s technology.Catalyst Control Center. Once you’ve
unlocked the card using ATI’s OverDrive
tool, you can initiate an automated soft-
ware routine that measures the system’s
tolerance for overclocking and then sets
up what it considers to be safe parameters
for overclocking the GPU and memory. In
our tests, OverDrive increased the card’s
core clock from 594MHz to 624MHz, and
the DDR3 memory’s clock speed from
693MHz to 797MHz.
ATI is also finally delivering on some of
its promises about Avivo video technology.Our early hands-on
experience with ATI’s
X1000-series of video-
cards left us wondering
if the Avivo demos we’d
seen were little more
than smoke and mirrors,
but the latest Catalyst drivers have dissolved
much of our skepticism: The X1800 XT’s
HQV benchmark scores are now far superior
to those of nVidia’s cards. And ATI tells us
there are more improvements to come.
CrossFire’s external cabling arrange-
ment still strikes us as a kludge, but if
having a pair of videocards with a gigabyte
of video memory is essential for your next
rig, the X1800 XT CrossFire could be a
worthwhile alternative to nVidia’s 512MB
7800GTX boards, especially if ATI can actu-
ally produce the boards in any appreciablequantity (finding 512MB nVidia boards con-
tinues to be as futile as looking for bones
in ice cream). And if video decoding is your
crucial videocard application, ATI’s Avivo
software is now the best solution—and it’s
free (nVidia’s PureVideo software costs an
additional $20).
—MICHAEL BROWNATI’s X1800 XT CrossFire Edition connects to either a second X1800
XT or an X1800 XL card in the same system via a dongle plugged into
the bifurcated port at the top of its mounting bracket.