GeCube Radeon X1800XT 512MB

GeCube Radeon X1800XT 512MB

Core Clock: 625MHz
Memory Clock: 1500MHz

With the release of ATI's Radeon X1900-series video cards, ATI's Radeon X1800-series has received a significant price drop. Along with the Radeon X1900XTX, X1900XT and X1900 CrossFire Edition cards, ATI also released the All-In-Wonder X1900 - a card designed to be the most complete card on the market.

While it's hard to deny that fact, because it comes with a great bundle and decent gaming performance, it lacks one key feature which would make it the most complete video card on the market. Unfortunately, the card lacks integrated support for HDCP content protection - something that's going to become increasingly important when HD-DVD and BluRay launch later this year.

We had a look at the reference ATI Radeon X1800XT in November, and found that it performed reasonably well - it was comparable to the faster GeForce 7800 GTX's, like XFX's Extreme Gamer Edition. Today, we're revisiting the performance delivered by the Radeon X1800XT with GeCube's implementation. With the release of the Radeon X1900-series, the Radeon X1800XT has come down to a price that's very similar to the All-In-Wonder X1900.

The card looks like any other Radeon X1800XT and you would be hard pushed to see a difference between this card and the reference board we looked at in November. It uses a dual slot cooler that exhausts the air out of the back of the case - it's a little warmer than the GeForce 7800 GTX, and is subjectively a little louder than it too. During gameplay, we didn't hear the fan speed up at all, and the noise emitted by the card was very tolerable.

Under the heatsink there are eight 1.2ns Samsung DRAMs rated to 800MHz (1600MHz DDR) with a 2.0v input voltage - there should be a little room for overclocking in them and we'll attempt to find that out later. The memory chips are cooled directly by the heatsink using thermal pads. Under the fan enclosure, there is an ATI Rage Theater 200 chip for Video-In Video-Out functionalities.

The box is well packed and the card comes packed inside a bubble wrap bag for additional protection. The bundle includes a selection of cables, connectors and software, along with a user manual. There is one game included, Delta Force Xtreme from Novalogic and there is also PowerDVD 5 and PowerDirector 2.5 ME Pro included to make use of the cards' VIVO functionalities. To finish the bundle off, there are two DVI-to-VGA adapters, a single 6-pin power adapter and cables for S-Video In/Out, Component Out and Composite In/Out. There are also extension cables to enhance the S-Video and Composite connectivity, too.