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ABIT's take on the X700 chipset was the least expensive by a good margin of the three we received. In our benchmarks, it topped 3DMark01, and even outperformed the speedier 6600GT's.
This card was the second poorest performing X800 XT on show in 3DMark01SE's DirectX 8 tests, with roughly 400 3Dmarks between it and the
Gigabyte RX80X256V. But DX8 testing certainly isn't everything these days, and ABIT's card put in a good showing to take fourth in the DirectX 9.0-based 3DMark05, putting it on par with the Labs winning
PowerColor X800 XT and
GeCube card.
Correction
This product was incorrectly labeled Sage Act! Professional in issue 87. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. |
GoldMine has had the upper hand for some time, but the release of ACT! 7.0 gives its rival much stiffer competition.
Where
XFX rose early with the DirectX 8 tests and dropped off in the DirectX 9.0 tests, this card did the exact opposite - it jumped up five places to the middle of the pack in 3DMark05.
AOpen began its run to glory by topping our 3DMark01 tests with an impressive 14,977 marks in the default resolution with four samples of full-scene anti aliasing.
With the X800's and 6800's hogging limelight, a new battle has begun for affordable, mid-performance cards -- the 6600GT's versus the X700's -- and ASUS has stepped up to the plate with its Extreme AX700Pro.
The X800XT PE is ATI's flagship technology, and its main change over the standard X800 XT is a core frequency increase from 500MHz to 520MHz, and a memory increase from 500MHz to 560MHz. Consequently, it performs better than the standard X800 XT's, topping all the benchmarks and achieving a phenomenal 26588 marks in 3DMark01 in 1024 x 768.
The GeCube is a good performer -- of the standard X800 XT's it produced the highest 3DMark05 score of 1024 x 768. Most current games require full DirectX 9.0 support to be played at their best, so a good 3DMark05 score means this willhandle the newest games -- at least until DirectX 10 appears.
Given NVIDIA's close development with id Software on Doom 3 we weren't all that surprised to see a member of the undead emblazoned across the front of the packaging, but we were surprised to find a treat inside.
The Gigabyte X800 offering is a strange beast. The accompanying package proclaimed it was a X800 XT PE (Platinum Edition), but further investigation found it to be a standard X800 XT.
NVIDIA has been criticised for its oversized graphics cards, but the shoe is on the other foot this time with HIS putting a truly massive cooler on its X800 XT card.
The key differentiator with the PDA2k over other PDAs is the whopping 128MB of RAM in-built for media and files. On top of this there's a separate 64MB ROM for the OS and an SD/MMC slot for further expansion.
Media Center is here but Tim Dean thinks it totally and utterly doesn't live up to expectations, but there might be some hope for the future.
Leadtek's 6600GT offering was a mixed bag this month. It didn't handle our DirectX 8 tests too well, but 3DMark05 saw a complete about face to see it sit in first.
Encarta Premium Suite claims a base of 130,000+ articles, along with 25,300+ photos and illustrations and 1.8 million map locations. That's more than a bit of bedtime reading, although of course there are really only two reasons why people buy digital encyclopedias these days -- either they've got kids to educate, or they're after some verifiable and quotable facts for a research project. For almost anyone else, of course, there's Google.
The 6600GT series has the best price and performance ratio at the moment, and consequently it's a very hotly contested market. The NX6600GT-TD128E is MSI's contribution to the mix, and while its a nice bundle, it's value for money needs to be more competitive.
The X700 is a relative newcomer to the PCI Express fold, and was released by ATI in response to NVIDIA's 6600 chipset. When comparing all the X700 cards that we received, we found each had its own pro's and con's, and this made them all decent propositions.
While large formed notebooks are great for the users with a static location, ultra portables are still the easiest and best way of conducting business for students, business people and the road warriors.
MSI's X800 XT finished finished up a bit over average. It's performance was relatively solid, and it held a commanding position in the synthetic benchmarks, placing third and fifth in the 3DMark tests.
The new Nokia Communicator unfortunately evokes early '90s mobile phones: it has a long body, small display and is not something you could slip into a pocket. Closed, the 9500 is monstrous, but when you open its sideways clamshell design the 9500 comes into its own.
The XDA (January 2003, page 41) and the
XDA II have both done well in
PC Authority reviews before, but our main complaint has been one of size: the XDA's are normal PDAs, but big phones. The XDA IIs still keeps a large touchscreen, but the unit is slightly slimmer and thinner than the previous models.
There's one thing that's immediately noticeable and annoying about the otherwise superb Xphone II: it's incredibly slow to turn on and boot up. We clocked about 72 seconds from pressing the power button to connecting to our service, with about a minute of that taken up by just booting the phone's OS.
After splitting the keyboard into left and right halves, there seemed to be nowhere else to go in creating a functional keyboard that was easy on the fingers. orbiTouch's Keyless Keyboard is one of a kind - it breaks from the normal keyboard fare and does away with keys altogether.
We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.
Are you a Linux user longing for iTunes? A bit of time and a little custom software can bring music to your ears.
The X800XT is at the cutting edge of gaming technology at the moment, and no card demonstrates this better than the PowerColor X800XT. It combines a killer price (for a high-end card), excellent performance, and a respectable bundle.
Wider than a normal phone and encroaching on PDA girth turf, the BlackBerry 7100v is both a capable phone and a capable PDA.
The myS-7 from Sagem is the company's first foray into the smartphone market with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. It's a little larger than the
Xphone II but this marginally wider neck means that keys are just that tiny bit wider, and when your main mode of input is the keypad this tiny extra can work wonders.
Like the
MSI X800XT-VTD256E, Sapphire's offering represents bang on average performance. But, unlike
MSI, this doesn't offer the feature set to offset the higher price.
At first glance, the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive appears very similar to a yo-yo in both size and mechanics. No, you won't be able to perform tricks with it, but … the attached USB cable does wrap around the device in a stringy sort of way.
You can stick them in your pocket or you can hold them in your hand. Six smartphones and phone PDAs reviewed
Noise levels and heat dissipation are two important factors in the design of small form factor (SFF) PCs. Low noise is particularly important in the growing home theatre PC market, where designs such as the Soltek EQ3801 are increasingly popular due their attractively small size.
The new Sony Ericsson P910i is the only true phone/PDA hybrid on review in this roundup so aesthetically it marries some of the largeness of a PDA with the slimness of a phone to end up with a unit that's just right: it's not too big and not too small.
Unfortunately, Sparkle's 6800GT was the only card available for this Labs, and we can't compare this apples to apples with the rest of the cards in the pack. But, we couldn't let it go untested so we compared this to the rest of the field for each benchmark, which gives an indication of its advantage over the other cards through both synthetic and real-world tests.
IPv6 should solve the problems with overcrowding on the Internet. Tim Dean delves into the guts of the next generation protocol.
The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.
Hallmark has opted to take advantage of Intel’s Extreme Graphics 2 integrated shared graphics, taking up to 64MB of video memory from the on-board 512MB of PC2700 DDR to power the display. While not designed for gaming, it did manage to churn out almost 3000 points in 3DMark01SE with some help from its Pentium M 1.6GHz CPU.
How will you be computing in the next 12 months? PC Authority brings you 2005's big technology stories - before they happen.
This card performed well in 3DMark01SE, producing 14,739 3Dmarks and falling just behind the top performing AOpen in this category. Unfortunately, it fell slightly behind the competition in the 3DMark05 high stress test, and even fell behind two of the three X700Pro cards on test.
