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.

Taking the ASUS X800XT PE out of consideration, this card won most of the benchmarks. It provided dazzling performance for the price in 3DMark01, with a score of 26115 in 1024 x 768, and still managed over twenty thousand marks in 1600 x 1200. That's quite an achievement, and evidence that this once system-mangling benchmark is no match for today's performance hardware.

Disagreements between NVIDIA and ATI about full DirectX 9.0 compatibility and image quality aside, FarCry looks stunning on this card, especially at 1600 x 1200 resolution -- and it plays silky smooth too. Half-Life 2 was developed with support from ATI so performance in this game is superb. Our in-house 'pcacoast3' benchmark demonstrates most gameplay situations - water reflections, physics, particle effects and more - and the PowerColor didn't break a sweat at higher resolutions, unlike the X700's and 6600GT's. The other game of note which caused an upgrade frenzy was, of course, Doom 3, and the PowerColor reproduced it faithfully: it reached a high 89.4 frames per second in 1024 x 768.

The card doesn't deviate much from the reference design, although its heatsink features a picture of 47 from Hitman: Contracts to coincide with the bundled game. PCI Express has had a slow take-up, due to high prices and a larger selection of AGP cards, but its time is now and the X800XT is one chipset to consider for high performance gaming. There can be only one winner, and for those searching for the best-value, high performance PCI-Express card, the PowerColor takes the prize.