Thursday Reviews

Quote

The GeForce 6 series of graphics accelerators from NVIDIA seems to have done a lot to help pull NVIDIA out of the quagmire of controversy and troublesome issues it fell into with the NV3x generation of GPUs. People who might have given up on NVIDIA are now paying attention again because the GeForce 6 family of GPUs performs well across the board. The comeback of SLI technology is another reason NVIDIA has more people leaning its way nowadays. Most of NVIDIA's current GeForce 6 series is available in AGP and PCI Express flavors. With the release of the 6600 line of cards, NVIDIA finally lauched its first native PCI Express GPUs, meaning they were designed for PCI Express. The 6600 GPUs represent the midrange of NVIDIA's line-up, and PCI Express is not widespread enough yet for any company to rely on sales of those products available in PCI Express form only. (One major reason is that AMD-compatible chipsets supporting PCI Express have been slow to come to market.) So, NVIDIA is making bridged AGP versions of the 6600 boards, too. NVIDIA wants to ship a high volume of these products to its partners, and that volume can be maximized only if AGP and PCI Express parts are available.

Quote

Today we take a close look at the HIS X700Pro IceQ Turbo including the impressive overclocking ability close to that of the Radeon X700XT which uses the new PCI Express interface and compare it against the older ATI Radeon X600XT VPU and see what is different and how it affects gaming performance in popular games such as HL2, Doom 3 and Far Cry.

Quote

It's hard to recommend any graphics card that costs more than a reasonable PC. £430 is an awful lot of money to be spending on a present card when a refresh is just around the corner. In that case, as comprehensive as it is, ASUS' AX800 XP PE/2DHTV package is simply too expensive to be considered by all but the very well-off enthusiast. Performance freaks should look towards SLI'ing a couple of 6800 GT cards, and for the rest, I'd recommend obtaining and overclocking the cheapest X800 XT you could lay your hands. The money you save will be better spent elsewhere.