"X1600PRO, X800GT/GTO/GTO2 versus GeForce 6600GT" confrontation
ASUS X800GTO 256 MB
Traditionally for ASUS, the package is more than sufficient. Perhaps, a good thing is worth of a good attire. Only the tests will tell how good the video card is - but for now only the package bundle.
The package bundle has proved moderate enough even for such a big box: two CDs with drivers, software and user's manual; two 15-pin D-Sub/DVI adapters; a VIVO (9-pin S-Video/HDTV/Composite) cable; a brief setup guide.
As is usual for ASUS, the board is made on a red-orange PCB. The front part of the card is covered by an impressive cooling system.
The video card operates without additional power supply, although the PCB has a pad for soldering it. There are two DVI and one VIVO connectors to plug in to the monitor and other devices.
The cooling system like the PCB has been inherited from EAX800XL. The same blue LEDs snap on during operation and the same disputable issue of memory cooling only from one side of the card.
The video card uses the R430 chip manufactured on the 5th week of year 2005. To make the video card cost cheaper, the GPU has merely 12 pipelines of 16 available activated. The number of vertex processors has remained unchanged - 6. The memory bus is also the same 256-bit. X800GTO runs at 400 MHz.
The card is equipped with 256 MB GDDR3 video memory in the form of eight chips in BGA packages, 4 on each side. It uses Samsung chips of 2 ns access time. X800GTO runs at 980 MHz.
Apart from image output to the TV, the video card also supports capture of video data sent from other sources (video camera, VCR, etc.) That is possible just due to the ATI Rage Theater chip.
Once power is applied, the video card starts gleaming with blue lights.
The overclocking can't be called successful. We were able to raise the clock speed by merely 15 MHz, and by 46 MHz for the video memory. That of course gave some minor performance boost which was almost negligible in some games.
HIS X800GTO 128 MB
The box of the HIS video card is not that big but nice-looking. The size of the package is worth the contents. Why bigger?
The package bundle does not contain anything extra: a user's manual, a CD with drivers, and a S-Video cable.
The board is made on a red PCB. On the GPU, there is a single-tier cooling system that does not touch the memory chips, i.e. they are not cooled at all. No additional power is provided.
The reverse side of the board is interesting for the aluminum radiators on the memory chips (they are fitted very tightly with glue). It turns out there is some misbalance in the cooling, therefore, to a high degree of probability these radiators are used for decorative purposes.
The cooling of the GPU is provided by a copper turbine with a quietly running fan, which is fastened to the board with three screws. The "silver" paint is used as the thermal interface.
To plug in monitors, there is an analogous DVI and an analogous D-Sub outputs. There are also TV-out's. The video card has no input functionality.
Once we rubbed the "silver" paint, we found the R480 chip which was made on the 8th week of year 2005. Use of this GPU should provide a very good overclocking result. Although merely 12 pipelines run in X800CTO, we can try making up for the missing 4 through raising the clock speed. By default, the GPU runs at 400 MHz.
The video card uses 128 MB of GDDR memory assembled of eight chips, 4 on each side of the board. Used are Hynix chips of 2.8 ns access time, which should provide 700 MHz operating frequency.
As we expected, it was possible to overclock the GPU by almost 50% up to 565 MHz, and at the same time we were able to start the chip at even higher frequencies although to the detriment of the image quality - artifacts came up. The memory overclocking proved more modest - 786 MHz, which is indeed not bad at all for the 2.8 ns memory.
Sapphire X800GT 128MB
Sapphire X800GT arrived without package - simply in the OEM version.
Besides the video card itself, we found the same bundle inside the package as that for the boxed version: a 15-pin D-Sub/DVI adapter, S-Video/Composite and S-Video/HDTV adapters, a S-Video cable, and a Composite cable. A drivers CD and a user's manual is missing. While the latter often goes to spoilage paper, the former would be really of great help. Despite frequent updates of the drivers and that in a couple of months such a CD is no longer urgent, not all users have fast access to Internet to download newer versions, and the most recent version is not always life-saving. But in most cases that is not an issue - the sales assistant will gladly present the buyer with an ordinary CD with the fresh driver recorded on, but anyway you'd better get ready that such is missing. These are shortcomings of the OEM package bundle. On the other hand, that is cheaper.
  The board is made of blue textolyte, is equipped with a small-size cooling system, although it is aimed at installing a more powerful turbine. The card does not require additional power supply.
The card has all the necessary connectors to output image: DVI, D-Sub, and TV-out. The card does not allow to input video with its functionality, since there is no soldered pad for a Rage Theater chip.
The small cooling system is fastened with merely two screws. It uses a copper radiator and, albeit small but a noisy fan. Although it allows adjusting the rotational speed, we were unable to get a quiet operation. It used the same thermal interface as that on BOX fans.
The card uses R423 GPU marked as X800GT, that is, merely 8 pixel pipelines with a texture unit on each are activated. The number of vertex processors has remained unchanged - 6. The operating clock speed is 475 MHz. The GPU was made on the 31st week of the last year. Some utilities (e.g., EVEREST 2.50) recognize the chip as X800SE. The memory bus is 256-bit as before.
The card uses 128 MB of video memory, eight GDDR Hynix (2.8 ns) chips - four on each side, running at 700 MHz. There is no memory cooling on the card.
Despite the no worst cooling, we were able to overclock the card to merely 581 MHz for the GPU and to 820 MHz for the memory, which gave a 17% performance boost.
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