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| visiontek 9800 xt |
Review/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell
The package contains everything you need to get started - the card itself, along with drivers, connectors, a quick install guide, 3d demos on the CD and a voucher for the much awaited Half life 2. At least we are spared the sub standard games CD which ends up in the bin.
On the CD you get the usual goodies - The ATI driver suite - an installation guide, Hydravision guide, power connector guide and a little FAQ. In the lower section you will also see a button linking to installs for the ATI demos/screensavers for Caves, Chimp, Gargoyle and Pipedream. Nothing you cant already download but a nice addition for those of you on dialup without the patience of a saint. The included overclocking utility of choice is the much acclaimed powerstrip. I already was a paid owner of this application and the newest version on the homesite was newer than the one supplied on Visiontek's CD. V3.47.
After hearing alot of positive feedback from our forum members I was looking forward to testing a Visiontek card - they arent readily available were I live except via USA mail order so when it arrived I was a little disappointed to see it was just a reference ATI board. Not particularly a bad thing mind you, as the ATI reference design is of a high standard but nonetheless some modifications might have been nice to see :¬)) Test Setup: The setup I chose was my main testing rig based around an Athlon Barton chip. These components when pushed to 225fsb hit a high of 20,500+ in 3dmark2001se (reference 9800 pro 128 board - now dead) -- this very same system was placed several months ago in 3rd place in the UK PCextreme magazine overclocking challenge section, and its still hanging around in the top 10. For this review I underclocked the rig alittle to 200/400fsb to give a better real world indication of performance as im aware only a minor percentage of users will be able to hit my standard FSB settings of 225/450 - 200/400 seems much more reasonable. A restart to clear memory was performed before every test and all possible background tasks were killed. All tests were run 3 times and the average used to ensure any possible issues were easily spotted. No windows third party tweaking, skinning or theming applications were installed. everything was run with a fresh clean "classic" theme. Hardware used
in testing: Software used in testing:
Above: The testing rig - 9800 pro 256 above the Visiontek 9800 XT The card itself weighs alot more than the 9800 Pro, and the overall build quality is high. Of course alot of users will remove the stock cooler and mod this card, but for the purposes of this review im going to show just how much you can get out of this card with this very same cooler and software overclocking.
Rear View of the card (above)
AMD Barton powered testing rig (above) The card takes the usual Molex power connector to the Power supply, ATI recommend a 300W+, I would personally recommend a high quality 400w PSU as a minimum especially when overclocking. The Sparkle I use for benching is very stable considering the additional fans and hard drives it is supporting. All readings from the rails are virtually reference. 5V-5.05 and 12V-12.08.
Sharing the limelight: Visiontek 9800 XT and Audigy 2
Next: Overclocking setup
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