Legit Reviews

Today Legit Reviews takes a look at the latest and greatest video cards that ATI has to offer. We take five of today's most played games to show you what card performs at your desired level of performance. We also toss in some nVidia GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series cards to give you the big picture. Read on to see which ATI card fits your budget and needs.

The entry level X1300 Pro proved itself to be a very good videocard for less than $150. When you consider the hardware requirements for Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista operating system going with a non-integrated graphics solution is mandatory in my book. It is also nice of ATI to allow the X1300's be run in Crossfire mode (two cards at once) without a master card. This gives entry level consumers the option of adding in another card and having plug-in-play Crossfire performance without the need of dongles.

Article Link: ATI X1000 Series Video Card Roundup
Pricing Link: Live Pricing

On a side note I'd like everyone to give a warm welcome to Brian Wallace (Wickedld9 on the forums). He is going to be Legit Reviews new video card reviewer. This is his first ever hardware review, and it was a very long article for any new reviewer to jump into. Brian and I are always open to advice on how to make LR's reviews better, so if you want to see something in our video card reviews please let us know. We are currently benchmarking the ATI X1800XT Crossfire cards and that will be Brian's second review on LR. Legit Reviews has not reviewed many cards in 2005, but with the addition of Brian to the staff we look forward to having monthly video card reviews.

Which 6200 TC did you use for the tests?
I think these are really promising cards, but I think the price is also a little too high right now to be able to compete with nVidia's 7 series cards (which are cheaper and perform better). Time will heal the prices though.
I'm definately excited to see these cards mature! I've always been a fan of ATI's image quality and performance under AA and AF, and these cards seem to deliver. The "Adaptive Anti Aliasing" looks very promising!
I'll just have to sit back and see how this develops in the retail scene...

Thanks for the review Brian!!!

I believe it was the XFX GeForce 6200 TC 128MB

i can attest to those charts with my X1800xl. at first i was having buyers remorse in getting this card because it wasnt running well in BF2.

i held a lan this weekend and i decided to run Quake 4 at ultra high 1280x1024 and 4x AA/AF. we had about 8 people playing in the matches. It was very rare that i went below 40fps, and most time maxed out. I was absolutly stunned!! There was one map that brought it to its knees with average 30fps, red dust or whatever, but other than that it was really nice to play with those settings!
for the ~300 price tag i am not complaining anymore. I know love my x1800. I still cant figure BF2 though why i cant maintain over 60FPS?!?!?!? Everyt other game runs great!!


Thank you for the review soooo very much. You are the only one to have done an in depth review on the card and i thank you for it!!!

Thanks for the thumbs up guys!
Dragon, can you post your PC specs and I will try to look into that? If that "red dust or whatever" is that demanding on the video card in Quake 4 I will record a new time demo. The demo that I have now runs far too well on even a 7800GT with the settings cranked up to be considered stressful.


Please let us know what else you'd like to see. As Nate said we've got a couple more articles coming very soon so if there is something that we're missing point it out and I'll include it.

-Brian

How about a little look at the overclocking potential of the cards?
What about operating temperatures? Stock cooler noise?

We will actually be looking at some of that coming up on the X1800XL as we are going to mod it to perform as the X1800XT in a small article.

Nice article bro

Nice review, great job.

Apoptosis wrote:We will actually be looking at some of that coming up on the X1800XL as we are going to mod it to perform as the X1800XT in a small article.

REALLY! Oh man, that's gonna be a goodie!

Overclock it like you stole it

Apoptosis wrote:Overclock it like you stole it

the overdriver that comes with it is kind of nice, i am able to get the core with stock up to 565mhz with no problem. The ram, if i touch it, it crashes. LOL

BTW
I have AMD 64 3800 X2
X1800xl
Audigy2
2 gigs of ram
WD raptors
ECS mobo

I play bf2 and all my games at 1280x1024 with 4x AA/AF and with EAX enabled.

Can't you increase the voltage to the GPU via software on these cards?

DragonCooler -> have you tried?

yes the software we are using on the X1800XL does increase the voltage I do believe. I talked with Brian over lunch and he should have the benchmarking/overclocking done on the X1800XL this week, so expect a "how to" article on overclocking one in the next week or so.

Apoptosis wrote:yes the software we are using on the X1800XL does increase the voltage I do believe. I talked with Brian over lunch and he should have the benchmarking/overclocking done on the X1800XL this week, so expect a "how to" article on overclocking one in the next week or so.

++

This would be nice, reallllllllyyyy nice!!


but i dont know if the software that comes with it does voltages, just mhz on teh mem. and gpu. wouldnt that have to all be done through the bios?

I have a suggestion for a future video card roundup review. looking around on many other sites I have never seen a video card review which was ranking and/or making purchase recommendations based on the ability of the cards for overclocking/modding. ex: when let's say the 1600XT has gddr3 memory that is rated at 1600Mhz and is clocked @ 1350Mhz, that card has a good OC potential on the memory not to mention the CPU. some cards are clocked at their rated speeds, thus not having much if any headroom for OC. other OC option would be the ability to open pipes and/or do a possible voltmod. I think- since LR is an enthusiast forum, there might be others who would be interested in the best bang for a buck from the OC ability point of view. adding descriptions of the possible OC, mods would be an icing on the cake.