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| VISIONTEK XTASY X800 PRO |
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Conclusion: It really is hard to fault the X800 pro board - it handles anything you throw at it no matter the setting you choose, when it does tend to struggle a little at maximum settings you can comfortably overclock the memory by almost 150/300mhz over default to compensate. To compliment this fantastic overclock there are also considerable savings to be made over the higher powered X800XT and in most cases unless you run everything with four times anti aliasing and sixteen times anisotropic filtering its barely noticeable. I was a little disappointed to see no third party modifications to ATIs reference board, it looks like this will be in the hands of companies like ASUS to develop their own custom cooling solutions. Visiontek have been selling ATI boards for quite a while now and they offer a lifetime replacement warranty and toll free tech support with minumum "on hold" times. I know a few of their staff and they are active on their own support forum helping users with any issues they have - you can also see Visionteks Technical support manager Michael Murphy on Driverheaven from time to time helping users with problems. In my experience its quite rare for a company to devote so much time to the end user, and this could well be a deciding factor when purchasing an X800 board. The powerful, highly overclockable and reasonably priced XTASY X800PRO coupled with Visionteks Lifetime replacement warranty comes unreservedly recommended and wins the Driverheaven Hardware Gold Award. With regards to the omission of the Rage Theatre Chip and Video Connector - "ATI's marketing strategy for North America procludes support for Rage Theatre chip and extra video connector. These features, however, are present on cards targeted at the European market."
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