Concluding thoughts
PowerColor's Radeon 9800XT will inevitably sell for a number of reasons. The underlying technology has refined the promise shown in the Radeon 9700 Pro, PowerColor now has good relationships with on-line vendors, pricing is quite aggressive at £320, and, importantly, the competition from NVIDIA isn't as strong as it has been in the past.Our benchmarks showed the 9800XT to be the leader of the high-end pack. Right there is one of PowerColor's problems. Its main competition doesn't present itself from the 9800 Pro 256MB or FX 5950 cards, rather, its from the plethora of other 9800XTs distributed via ATI's AIB partners. So correct evaluation of any 9800XT has to take other partners' efforts into account. In this regard, PowerColor's overall package is decidedly average. The card is a copy of the reference design. ASUS has shown that it can release custom models with extra features. Further, the PowerColor's bundle is almost generic. HalfLife2, in our eyes, is not a selling feature. Every card features it, and the game's release date is in question. The addition of Tomb Raider: TAOD, along with Big Mutha Truckers, offers some value, though.
PowerColor, then, has to position its 9800XT on the basis of price. It doesn't contain enough novel or value-adding features to warrant purchasing for anything other than low price, and priced at around £320, it's one of the cheaper retail 9800XTs. Overall, our advice is simple. If you require a no-nonsense Radeon 9800XT card the PowerColor version is as good as any. But what will make you choose it over, say, a Sapphire or Connect3D card ?. That's one question that PowerColor will have to answer. As far as we're concerned, you can add all those cards into one large hat and enjoy a similar gaming experience, irrespective of which card comes out of the hat.
Bottom line: a sold, depenedable card that's based on a performance GPU. There's no special reason to pick the PowerColor card. Then again, there's no special reason not to.
