Final thoughts
ATI and its partners have tried to cleverly position their RADEON X800 XL 256MB cards at a price point that's clearly below that of most GeForce 6800 GT's. Our performance graphs indicate that it trades blows with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT in a variety of games, often winning in D3D titles and losing out in OpenGL tests. That, in my mind, makes it an attractive VPU to base a retail card upon, and GeCube has taken the challenge of introducing an AGP variant of the native PCI-Express design.The bridged card opens up the X800 XL for a well-established market that covers a plethora of chipsets, and the Rialto bridge doesn't appear to hurt performance at all. GeCube's eschewed the reference design by using an in-house cooling system, although it's not as elegant as the company's Uni-Wise implementation. Going with a custom cooler has added extra noise over and above the reference card's, so GeCube loses a few marks here. The card, too, is a larger-than-normal affair, making installation into small form-factor PCs needlessly difficult. The saving grace, as far as design is concerned, is the inclusion of ATI's no-frills Rage Theater ASIC, giving rise to basic VIVO functionality. The bundle makes a point of reiterating the card's HDTV and VIVO compatibility, but, other than that, it's strictly average.
GeCube's X800XLA-VIVO is based on a successful VPU but doesn't make full use of it. Ideally, what I'd like to see is an AGP model outfitted with Uni-Wise cooling and housed on a smaller PCB. As it is, the GeCube X800XLA-VIVO is a simply average implementation of a decent VPU.
HEXUS Right2Reply
We asked GECUBE, under the HEXUS Right2Reply initiative, to respond to our article. Marketing Manager, Serene Hsu, kindly replied with the following.The secret to this card is the '31.36GB/sec of juicy bandwidth' which keeps its 16 fully-featured pipelines up near the magical 100% utilisation level at all times. Result ? Enough gaming power to drive all modern games at 1600x1200 without taking much more than £200 out of your piggy bank.
Millions of Half Life 2 fans across the globe will love the fact that the 6800 Ultra struggles to keep ahead of the GeCube X800XL - even though it can cost well over $200 more. HEXUS Labs tests show that the GeCube X800XL AGP is already faster than the 6800 Ultra in FarCry at stock speeds... but when you overclock the GeCube card it pulls a clear 10% ahead of the Ultra. It even delivers over 30fps in Doom 3 at 1600x1200 - amazing !
Bang-for-buck, at the high end, this is our stronges$t card to date and a natural upgrade for any serious gamer with an AGP set-up. Available now from eBuyer on both sides of the Atlantic !
Serene Hsu
Marketing Manager
GECUBE
