Final Thoughts, HEXUS.awards, HEXUS.right2reply & HEXUS.afterburner
Priced at around £275 or so, ABIT's Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB card is up against some stiff competition, not least from ATI's own X850 XT 256MB SKU. Approaching evaluation of the card from a pure performance point of view leaves us a touch underwhelmed. The goodness of a 512MB framebuffer simply does not show too well in our benchmarks, even when conducted at 1600x1200 with 6x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering. What we see is an X850 XT 256MB, and generally a GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB, ahead in practically all the tests. Right now, then, £275 can be better spent on faster hardware.Is it all about speed, though? ABIT already knows that a 512MB card isn't going to looked upon too favourably from a performance standpoint, so it has thrown the reference design out of the proverbial window and started from square one. What the Fatal1ty edition provides you is with, in summary, is a card packed with features. Dual BIOSes is a neat idea which ABIT has used to good effect, offering an XTurbo mode that adds extra clock speed to both core and RAM. vGuru is also an excellent innovation, providing excellent hardware monitoring and tweaking, and ABIT's one-touch overclocking is the first implementation of such an idea on a modern graphics card.
Whilst ABIT has sugar-coated the X800 XL 512MB VPU with its range of sweet new features, we find it hard to recommend it unreservedly. It's ostensibly slower than similarly-priced cards, and speed is, after all, why most users shell out £275 on a graphics card. However, it's been refreshing to see a company willing to design better and cleverer cards than the majority of other board partners, and we hope to see more innovation from the folks at ABIT on, dare we say it, faster GPUs.
The ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB graphics card, then, is the best X800 XL 512MB-class card we've come across thus far. The intrinsic problem with it and other X800 XL 512MB cards is a comparative lack of performance per pound, so die-hard gamers would probably do better looking elsewhere, perhaps to a card that's likely to be launched soon.....
All in all, a refreshing change to the tired world of reference-based retail cards.
HEXUS Awards
ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB
ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB
HEXUS Right2Reply - ABIT
Commenting under the World Leading HEXUS Right2Reply initiative, Michael Littler from ABIT UK had this to say about our article:The ABIT Fatal1ty X800XL 512MB card is the first Fatal1ty edition 3D graphics accelerator brought to market.
As HEXUS.net correctly assert, we've implemented a number of overclocking and monitoring features on the card, and these successfully complement, and mirror, Award Winning ABIT innovations in the motherboard market.
Although the X800XL 512MB implementation clearly does not compete against certain faster GPU clock speeds, our own tests indicate that it convincingly outperforms less feature rich examples of the more-expensive X850 PRO on a range of benchmarks. Furthermore, even today, in certain scenarios the additional 256MB of video memory will provide measurable benefits and an improved gaming experience.
These benefits will become even more apparent in as yet unreleased games titles, so this a another exclusive ABIT product which has a notably high-level of future proofing.
As ATI Technologies have asserted previously, future games will increasingly make use of this extra memory capacity.
Certainly here at ABIT we're proud that HEXUS.net recognise the ABIT Fatal1ty X800XL 512MB as "the best X800XL 512Mb-class card".
Michael Littler
Business Development & Public Relations
ABIT UK
HEXUS.afterburner
the ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB is innovative, fast and something exclusive for power gamers that enjoy a bit of willy-waving - at this snapshot in time, our take is that a 256MB variant of the ABIT Fatal1ty X800 XL would make a killer bit of kit, at a price with greater appeal. PDFeel free to share your thoughts with us here in the HEXUS.community
