Cyborg

<<<<TOP 10>>>>

1) ATI Radeon X1900
ATI's X1900 cards, which so far come in XT, XTX, and Crossfire versions as well, are at the top of ATI's current product line for gamers. The performance is very similar to that of GeForce 7 cards. As with earlier ATI cards, the X1900 XT is better than the plain X1900, and the XTX is better still. The X1900 features an impressive 48 shader units and some versions have 512 MB of memory, but they don't come cheap.


2) nVidia GeForce 7900 GTX
The GeForce 7900 is nVidia's premium chipset for gamers, and has several improvements over the 7800. As well as better performance, it's smaller, has fewer transistors, and generates less heat. Subsequently, it should cost less to manufacture cards using the 7900 than the 7800 in the long run, but at the moment they are quite expensive. To be sure, it's a force to be reckoned with and keeps up to the Radeon X1900 XTX on most benchmarks.

3) nVidia GeForce 7800 GTX
With 24 pixel pipelines, 8 vertex units, and an astonishing 302 million transistors, the GeForce 7800 is one of the most complex graphics processors ever built. By comparison, an Xbox GPU has 60 million transistors. Like GeForce 6 cards, the 7800 supports SLI (Scalable Link Interface), which is nVidia's dual card solution.

4) ATI Radeon X1800 XT
The X1000 series from ATI so far includes the X1900, X1800, X1600, and X1300. The X1800 XT is one of their premium offerings with ultra-threaded 3D architecture, improved memory controller efficiency, and Shader Model 3 support. It outperforms the GeForce 7800 GTX on many benchmarks despite having fewer pipelines, and the core hums along at 625 MHz.

5) nVidia GeForce 6800 GT
nVidia's GeForce 6800 series represented the largest leap in game card performance to come along in years. They support DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0 and are available for both AGP and PCI Express. Note that the 6800 Ultra wants two auxiliary power connectors, so you might want to go with the 6800 GT, which only needs one. An excellent card that should get more affordable now that the 7800s are out.

6) ATI Radeon X850 XT
A slightly older chipset from ATI targetted at gamers is the X850, which is available in Pro, XT, and XT Platinum Edition (PE) versions. There is also a Crossfire Edition for those of you interested in running a system with two graphics cards, though this is prohibitively expensive for most purposes. The X850 can be found for AGP and it's a nice choice for a relatively affordable upgrade if Shader Model 3.0 support isn't important to you.

7) nVidia GeForce 6600 GT
Although very similar to the 6800 cards, including DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0 support, nVidia has made some changes to make the 6600 series more affordable. They have fewer pixel pipelines, fewer pixel shader units, and the memory bus has been reduced to 128-bit from 256-bit, but they still offer exceptional game performance. AGP versions of this card are also available, and recent price drops have made the 6600 GT a great value.



8) ATI Radeon X1600 XT
The Radeon X1600 is a mid-range chipset from ATI aimed at those seeking something easier on the wallet than the X1800 and X1900, but better performing than the X1300. It is very comparable in both speed and price to GeForce 6600 technology. Although the X800 is a little faster in some cases, you may want to go with an X1600 because it has Shader Model 3.0 support, which X800 and X850s do not have.

9) ATI Radeon X700
The X700, X700 Pro, and X700 XT are some of ATI's older mid-range cards, originally meant to compete with nVidia's 6600 line. They fall roughly between the vanilla GeForce 6600 and the 6600 GT on many benchmarks. You can now get PCI Express or AGP models of this card. A decent value even before the X1000 cards put downward pressure on the price, but no Shader Model 3.0 support, which more games are now using.

10) ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
Radeon X1300s are designed for gamers on a budget. They don't really compare in performance to other cards on this list, but they do support Shader Model 3.0 and they run most games adequately at lower settings. I recommend the Pro model because it's a little faster than the vanilla X1300. With some shopping around and maybe a rebate, you should be able to find an X1300 Pro card for about $100

TechBoy

The reviewers must be NVidiots

X1800XT 512MB should be #3 & X1800XT 256MB should be #4 as I got 9032 3DMark 05 Score with my X1800XT 512MB which is more than 7800GTX & 7900GT & X1800XT 256MB defeats 7900GT when HDR & AA are switched on

7800GTX should not exist in this list as 7900GT Scores more than 7800GTX

there should be X1800GTO instead of 6800GT, X1800XL instead of X850, 7600GT instead of 6600GT & X800GTO2 instead of X700 for obvious reasons

ITRocks

My list of top cards at thier time(There were faster cards then these but for the money they were just about perfect)...

Vodoo in Sli(The King)
Riva 128ZX
Original TNT
Original GeForce
GF Ti 4200
ATi 9800 Pro
GF 6800GT
ATi X1900XT
GF 7900GT (Maybe Just Maybe but with X1800XT prices droppping maybe not )

savvytechno

With moves underway to make PCs more like white goods than beige boxes, the need for the internals of a PC to run as silently as possible has never been greater. One of the major causes of sudden, high-pitched screaming noises coming from your PC is the graphics card's cooling fan, so let's get rid of it.

In the not too distant past this meant sacrificing any idea of high-speed games play and relying on slow, low powered cards that didn't get too hot. Today, things have changed dramatically, with many manufacturers offering either water-cooled or custom fan-cooled, high-end cards, as well as passively-cooled mid- and value-range cards.

One of the latest of the latter type is from Asus, the EAX1600XT Silent, which joins a growing number of silent cards produced by Asus on both ATI and Nvidia platforms. Given the name, it comes as no surprise that the EAX1600XT Silent is built around ATI's Radeon X1600XT unit, a mid-range card which offers reasonably good performance for a good price: ATI's 'best bang for your buck' model.


Straightway the EAX1600XT Silent looks different from most cards, as there's very little in the way of cooling hardware on the front of the card; just a plate on top of the GPU with two heat pipes coming out of it. Follow these pipes around to the back of the card and you'll be confronted by a large heatsink that draws away the heat.

Under the plate on the front of the card sits a reference-clocked Radeon X1600XT, or, to give it its code name, the R530. The core is built on a 90nm fabrication process with just 157 million transistors and has 12 pixel pipelines, 8 vertex pipelines and a 128-bit memory interface. The core is clocked at a standard 590MHz while the 256MB of DDR3 memory is also clocked at reference speeds; 690MHz (1.38GHz effective).

The Radeon X1600 is also ATIs first core in the mainstream segment to offer Shader Model 3.0 support, something that the next generation of games will make full use of. That the card only has a single DVI connector will disappoint some people, as many of the latest cards have two DVI ports, but at least you do get a DVI-to-VGA adapter for the VGA port. Joining these two on the backplane is an S-Video port.

In performance terms, the EAX1600XT Silent does a pretty good job. 3DMark05 scores 5,475 at a resolution of 1024 x 768, while in the real world tests, Half Life 2 and FarCry give 65fps and 51fps (frames per second) respectively. Remember, this is with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering turned on, but all detail settings at maximum. Dropping these down or turning them off will, of course, return faster frame rates.

savvytechno

If you're looking to spend more than £350 on a gaming graphics card then we applaud you, but we also acknowledge that you have a dilemma on your hands. The big decision is whether you should choose the GeForce 7900GTX or the Radeon X1900 XTX.

Of course both chips are very good indeed, and if it was a simple question of performance then the X1900 XTX would get the nod, however there are other considerations to bear in mind. Some people prefer Nvidia's ForceWare drivers over the ATi Catalyst offerings, and you can't ignore the fact that SLI is a more stable platform than CrossFire if you fancy the idea of running dual graphics cards.

But for many people the choice is much, much simpler than that. All you have to do is to listen to an X1900 XTX roaring away when it starts to work hard and compare it to the near-silent 7900GTX and bingo, Nvidia's got another customer.


The problem is that the X1900 XTX has 380 million transistors in its core and draws about 150W of power which results in a great deal of waste heat. By contrast the 7900GTX has 278 million transistors and draws less than 100W, and as a result it is relatively simple to cool the Nvidia chip while ATi cards often have industrial cooling solutions.

As an ATi partner and manufacturer Sapphire is well aware of this problem and it has come up with an ingenious solution in the shape of the Blizzard X1900 XTX. The basic card is a standard X1900 XTX with a core speed of 675MHz and memory that runs at 1.6GHz, so performance is monstrously fast just like every other X1900 XTX on the market.

The clever part is the liquid cooling solution, which is a Thermaltake Tide Water mini system that replaces the standard heatsink, fan and cooling duct. The water block connects to a pair of 10mm diameter rubber hoses which carry coolant to the cooling module that plugs into a PCI slot. This module uses a four-pin Molex connector to power the fan and pump and as things stand you need two slots to mount the card plus an additional slot for the cooler, although we understand that this layout may change.

On the edge of the cooler there is a switch that allows you to select a 'Low' or 'High' speed for the fan. The Low setting gives a fan speed of 2,000rpm and a noise level of 18dBA while the High setting of 2,500rpm gives a level of 26dBA. This noise is constant as the graphics card drivers have no control over the cooling module so the fan keeps spinning regardless of the graphics workload and this makes the High setting utterly pointless. On Low the Blizzard is very quiet indeed and the graphics chip stays cool at all times.

savvytechno

First things first. If you see one of these limited edition cards for sale, buy it, no questions asked; just part with the cash. The reasons for doing so will become clearer as we go along.

ATI's X800 series of cards has been one of its most successful to date, with a whole host of cards, both PCI-E and AGP, bearing the X800 moniker. Out of the box, Sapphire's X800 GTO2 looks just like any other Sapphire card based around a reference ATI X800 design; red PCB and standard cooler, albeit with a smart graphic on it which matches the box art.

But perhaps the biggest giveaway that all is not what it seems is the inclusion on the board of a PCI-E power connector; the standard X800 doesn't have or need any additional power. The X800 GTO2 is, in fact, a classic example of why you should never judge a book by its cover.


This is because under the skin of the X800 GTO2 lurks an R480 core, not the standard R430 core of the X800. For those not in the know, the R480 is the core of the once king-of-the-heap X850XT.

The reasoning behind this is quite straightforward. As in any manufacturing process, sometimes GPU cores come off the line with some functions not working properly, or for some reason not able to run at their highest clock speeds. In the case of the R480 core in the X800 GTO2, it's the pixel pipelines that are the problem. Instead of the normal 16, only 12 were found to be working, and that's how many a standard X800 has, hence the X800 moniker for this card. Because of this, not only is the X800 GTO2 highly overclockable, but it can also be modded.

The fun really begins when you use the widely available (on the Web) BIOS tweak that enables the remaining four pixel pipelines, so now you have an X800 card with the pixel pipelines of an X850. But it doesn't stop there; even using the standard cooler the card comes with, the X800 GTO2 is capable of some very serious and stable overclocking.

Out of the box the card comes with a 400MHz core clock, just a tad faster than the standard X800's 390MHz. However the 256MB of Samsung 1.6ns GDDR3 memory has been given a hefty tweak and runs at 490MHz DDR (980MHz effective) as opposed to the X800's 350MHz.

savvytechno

At the time of writing the GeCube X850XT uses the most powerful ATI graphics chip that money can buy, the Radeon X850XT. This is all about to change, of course, as any day now ATI will launch the Radeon X1800 to regain the ground that it has lost to Nvidia and its mighty GeForce 7800GTX.

This makes it a little tricky to get the correct perspective on the GeCube X850XT, as it's an incredibly impressive graphics card that has a great deal of history behind it. During development the Radeon X850XT was codenamed R480, and it was directly developed from the X800 Pro (R423), the 9800XT (R360), the Radeon 9800 (R350) and right back to the Radeon 9700 (R300).

Besides anything else this means that the GeCube doesn't fully support the features of DirectX 9.0c but instead has to settle for DirectX 9.0b, which isn't the end of the world but it does look bad on the spec sheet. The X850XT uses 16 pixel pipelines and six vertex pipelines with a huge core speed of 520MHz, plus DDR3 memory with an effective speed of 1.08GHz and a 256-bit memory controller.


The core speed is about 100MHz higher than you'll find in an Nvidia graphics card yet GeCube has managed to build the X850XT in a single slot design which uses a copper heatsink that contains a heatpipe to dissipate the heat more effectively. The fan is slightly larger than normal at 65mm diameter which helps the GeCube to run reasonably quietly, yet it also remains cool during even the most intense 3D use.

The card uses the six-pin PCI Express power connector that we are becoming accustomed to seeing, but if you don't have a suitable power supply you'll find a PCI-E power adapter, as well as a TV cable which splits to offer S-Video and coaxial inputs and outputs, extension S-Video and coaxial cables and an RGB cable.

You also get a software package which consists of CounterStrike Condition Zero, PowerDVD and PowerDirector for the asking price. But what, we hear you ask, is the performance like? Well we're glad you asked.

The GeCube X850XT is fast. Fast, that is, by the standards of the GeForce 6800, but unfortunately Nvidia has moved the goalposts with the new GeForce 7800. The X850XT has about 80 percent of the performance of the 7800GT which sells for a similar price, and about 70 percent of the 7800GTX which sells for rather more. You can overclock the GeCube by ten percent easily enough, but the 7800GT overclocks by between ten and 20 percent which makes the gap even larger.

savvytechno

When nVidia launched its new graphics core, the G70, at a huge shindig in Paris complete with motorbikes and go-go dancers, everybody settled down for a long wait for the cards. After all, that's what usually happens when either of the big two graphics companies launches a high-end card.

But no. Nvidia promised that cards would be available the day after the launch, and Lo! they weren't. But they were available very soon afterwards. So after that surprise, surely ATI would come along and rain on Nvidia's parade? No; we are still waiting for ATI's response, the R520 core.

Back to the G70, which builds on the important features found in the previous NV40 core (the GeForce 6800) such as Shader Model 3.0, SLI support and so on, and adds some important and powerful architecture changes.

While the NV40 was built on a 130nm process and featured 222 million transistors, the G70 is built on a 110nm process with the transistor count rising to a colossal 302 million. The number of pixel pipelines has risen from 16 to 24, with two more vertex units (8 as against 6 in the NV40) and it has the latest version 4.0 of the CineFX architecture. Speed-wise the core runs at 430MHz while the GDDR3 Samsung memory speeds along at 600MHz DDR (an effective 1.2GHz) via a 256-bit memory bus.

In terms of performance the NX7800GTX leaves both the 6800Ultra and ATI's X850XT Platinum edition standing; at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 the NX7800GTX recorded a 3DM05 score of 7,495, as opposed to 5,752 for MSI's own 6800Ultra and 6,187 for a reference X850TX PE. When it came to a real game, the NX7800GTX produced a score of 110fps when benched with Doom 3, compared to 94 and 90fps for the 6800Ultra and X850XT PE respectively.

The box contains some useful items; a 6-pin to 4-pin power cable should your power supply not have one, an S-Video cable (which by way of a change is a useful length), a cable splitter that gives S-Video in/out,

savvytechno

ATI has taken the step of introducing a two-slot cooling solution, its first, for the X850XT Platinum Edition. The large copper heatsink sits under a plastic shroud as does the large fan. This fan spins quickly and although it makes quite a din when first booted up, it soon settles down to a quiet hum. The fan draws air over the heatsink and dumps it out of the back of the case. Check it out on the stores now.

savvytechno

If you want great solution for high performance then go for SLI , but it has its drawbacks–it requires an SLI motherboard, and takes up more slots. Nvidia delivers SLI in a single card with the GeForce 7950 GX2.