H.I.S. Excalibur Radeon X800 XT - VIVO Platinum Edition (PCI-Express)

The Card

The GPU heatsink dominates this card. With a large fan to move air, the copper sink easily covers half of the exposed PCB.

  

The copper heatsink itself, sits on the GPU while the fan is offset to blow air down the channels made by the sink's copper fins toward the rear of the card.

  

Though there are no heatsinks on the memory, which is unusual for HIS. The design of the GPU sink and fan should help to move air away from the memory chips somewhat.

And speaking of memory, let's take a look at what kind of memory HIS is using for this card.

These Samsung GDDR3 K4J55323QF-GC20 chips are rated at 2.0ns for a maximum bandwidth of 500MHz (1GHz in DDR terms). With the memory already running at it's maximum rated speed, I wouldn't count on much headroom, if any, for overclocking.

One of the differences between the PCI-Express and AGP versions of this card are the power connectors on the rear. The AGP X800XT uses the standard 4-pin Molex that we are used to seeing everywhere else.

  

However, the PCI-Express version uses a 6-pin connection for the power. Never fear, a conversion cable is included with the card in case your PSU (like mine) does not have the needed cable. Expect power supplies to have this connector down the road.

Like the X600XT we reviewed awhile back, the X800XT is VIVO capable using ATi's Rage Theatre chip for encoding.

 

Finally we have our VGA and DVI ports with S-Video between the two.

BACK                    NEXT

Select Page Introduction GPU, Testing Code Creatures, Q3, UT2003 UT2004, Far Cry Anti-Aliasing Overclocking & Conclusion HOME