Date:
Monday , March 14, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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VisionTek XTASY X850 XT Review

Today we have VisionTek’s first retail RADEON X850 XT-based video card up for evaluation. We take it through the full gamut of gaming in six of the most demanding games comparing it to the competition along the way.

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System Test Setup:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4), AMD Athlon 64 FX-55, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400 Cas2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

For our system platform setup, we used the ASUS A8N-SLI PCI Express platform with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU at default speeds so that the CPU wouldn’t be so much of a bottleneck to these fast video cards.

VisionTek XTASY RADEON X850 XT 256MB PCI-E – We tested with the XTASY X850 XT at default speeds, which are 520MHz / 1.08GHz. We used Catalyst 5.2 with CCC at the default settings with VSYNC disabled.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-E – We used an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-Express video card and overclocked it to Ultra speeds of 400MHz / 1.1GHz. We used beta ForceWare 71.84 drivers at the default settings with VSYNC disabled.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-E – We used an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB PCI-Express video card for comparison at default speeds of 350MHz / 1GHz. We used beta ForceWare 71.84 drivers at the default settings with VSYNC disabled.

Game Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples.” The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section, we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit of frame rates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.