ATI Radeon X1800 GTO Launched

SippinTea writes "ATI has also hastened to market with a launch of their own this week, with a new Performance Mid-Range Graphics Card. The Radeon X1800 GTO is a chopped-down version of the Radeon X1800 XL with 12 pixel pipelines and less expensive, lower speed GDDR3 DRAM on board. It compares well with the new GeForce 7600GT but can it compete with a GeForce 7900GT for only a few dollars more?"

Comments

Re:Too many video cards

[tomstdenis]

Yes, and the actual "game pleasure improvements" you get from an FPS because you have a 500$ card versus a 150$ card is probably fairly low.

Key things to look for

1. Get nvidia. The driver support is there.
2. Stick one revision back [e.g. 6xxx instead of 7xxx]
3. Don't get "shared memory" LE or LS or whatever edition cards
4. Don't get 256MB cards unless there is no price difference [or a very small one]
5. Look for native TV out if that's your bag. Sadly nvidia cards often need win32 drivers to get tvout working which makes it useless for media boxes
6. Look for editions which are passively cooled. Some of the later FX5200 series cards had nothing but a giant heatsink on it. No noise!

For my media box I simply got a 20$ PCI [yes, not even AGP] ATI card in VESA mode. Sure it uses a lot of cpu time to blit in all software, but it's on a dual-core 4800+ so I don't really care [fwiw playing dvds takes ~35% of total cpu power to play].

Tom