Monday Hardware Reviews

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The best offerings in the X1300 and X1600 range are what we look at today, as the markers for their sub markets, so join us as we analyse RV515 and RV530 in a modicum of depth internally, before looking at the physical specifics and performance levels of X1300 PRO and X1600 XT.

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While we have followed, and still are following, the battle for the high-end between NVIDIA and ATI sometimes it seems we forget the real important battle 'below', the fight about the mid-end. When the X1600XT was announced there were some concerns that it wasn't priced correctly when you compared it to similar NVIDIA cards. ATI responded by lowering the price and today the X1600XT is a chipset that offers a lot of features and performance for its price.

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R580, moreso than any modern GPU that meets the D3D9 spec, therefore relies on software to show it off. Even current synthetic benchmarks designed to show off theoretical rates in 3D hardware can have a hard time exploiting the tripling in fragment processing ability. That's not to say the performance increases at the same clocks as R520 are invisible. Clearly they're not without increases, especially at the higher resolutions, of up to 30% in the games we tested, clock-for-clock.

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ATI’s new flagship video card is the X1900XTX. Thankfully the performance of the card matches the length of its name. It comes with a core clock of 650MHz and 512MB of RAM clocked at 1.55GHz. For those wondering X1800XT was clocked at 625MHz core, and 1.5GHz memory. It’s difficult to tell the differences between the new card and the old card on the outside, with the only noticeable differences being the number of mosfets next to the long red heat sink toward the end of the board...

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The high-end video card war continues with ATI's latest GPU X1900 (R580). Sporting 3 times the pixel shader processors over the X1800XT and twice as many as the GeForce 7800GTX ATI has release a real power-horse. Even more important is the fact that the cards already are in stock in some online-stores which means it isn’t a paper-launch.

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The Club-3D 7800GT 256MB has come through our tests as one of the best performing cards around. The overall package is nice, although you can probably find a better package from other manufacturers, they will likely cost more. You get everything you need and a few extras to boot but the package is really all about the card; which is as it should be.

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The only thing you can say negatively about the 6150K8MA is a point that is mitigated almost into neutrality; that of video output. Yes, the Foxconn 6150K8MA lacks the current high definition outputs to feed a HDTV however, how many HTPC systems don't sport at least a moderate range VGA card and TV card such as the Hauppauge TVR? Not many.

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Corsair is one of the premier memory producers in the world. Their products are easily accepted as some of the highest quality memory on the market and the Pro Series modules brought LED activity indicators to Random Access Memory. With the overclockability of the AMD64 line of processors this product would be the perfect fit for the gamer looking to squeeze a little bit more performance from their machine by pushing the front side bus from 200 to around 218 Mhz. This moderate overclock, while not exactly in line with the hardcore overclockers pushing 800 - 1000 Mhz on the AMD64 platform, would fit the needs of the tweaker / gamer perfectly.