Powercolor 9800XT

Today will be taking a look at Powercolor fastest video card, powered by the now famous ATI 9800XT.




This card is bundled with:

1 X DVI to VGA converter

1x video S-VHS cable

VHS video cable

SVHS to VHS adaptor

Y-power cable

Drivers, Games CD's

Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness

Voucher for Half Life 2 when it's released.


The 9800 XT is based on the same structure of the 9800 with an increased core and memory speed,
Core/Memory speeds:
* Radeon 9800 XT - 412/365
* Radeon 9800 Pro - 380/340
* Radeon 9800 - 325/290
* Radeon 9700 Pro - 325/310

The 9800XT comes with 256MB of DDR memory, which is only used in the rare cases of high resolution in combination with full scene anti-aliasing.

You can connect your TV and 2nd monitor
- VGA
- TV-out (S-Video connector)
- DVI-I Connector



Powercolor followed ATI's reference design by the letter; this translates into a good, yet quiet cooling solution for the GPU and memory




As with the R9800 it requires power directly from the 12V line of your PSU, the provided 4-pin Y-cable makes sure you won't lose any connectors.

The fan used on this card is larger than seen on most; it reduces the produced sound without sacrificing airflow,



The card is sandwiched between 2 copper heatsink, a TIM is placed between the copper and the memory chips to increase the heat transfer




Let's start testing!

Testing

The ATI 9800XT GPU is the current king of performance, as a lot of benchmark results have showed in the past (Anandtech ,HardOCP); We are going to take a look at what kind of performance and image quality increase you can expect when upgrading to this speedy video card.

We will put it head to head with the video card which took the first spot in the DX8 performance graphs when it was released, the nVidia Geforce 4 Ti4600. It does not have support for the advanced features of DirectX 9.

What games did we test?

Chrome (DX8 , some DX9 effects)

GTA3 Vice City (Pure DX8 game)

Halo: Combat Evolved (DX9 support)

Need for Speed: Underground (DX9 support)

Call Of Duty (OpenGL game)

Far Cry (DX9 support)

more? suggest here

Test Setup:

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Intel P4 2.4 "C"
Mainboard	* Chaintech 9PJL2 Silver
Cooling	Zalman CNPS7000-CU
Memory	2 * 256Mb PC3700 OCZ Rev.2
Video	* PNY Geforce 4 Ti4600 * Powercolor R9800XT

On the software side of things, we used Windows XP SP1 and the Catalyst 4.2 drivers for the Radeon and nVidia's ForceWare drivers version 53.03 for our GF4 Ti4600.

FRAPS 2.0 was used for the screenshots and measuring average performance.

AF = Anisotropic Filtering
FSAA = Full Scene Anti Aliasing




Off we go ->

Chrome:

Chrome is a First Person Shooter with gorgeous graphics and okay gameplay (review).

Performance :

At 1024x768 gameplay was fluent on both cards without FSAA/AS, when I enabled FSAA and AF the frame rate drop was quite significant on the Ti4600, while the R9800XT's suffered only a little bit. During all these test this pattern will be much the same, as the R9800XT has the needed power to run almost all games out there with the quality settings turned up high.



No FSAA/AF

Even without AF, we see the Radeon producing a clearer image then the Ti4600






2x FSAA / 2x AF

The 2x FSAA settings doesn't change a lot, while the AF settings further improves the image for both cards, with the XT in the lead.





There was another difference between the DX8 and DX9 card, reflections, this however is very hard to capture with a still screenshot. When playing Chrome with the Radeon there were a lot more reflective surfaces and the reflections update rate was higher, creating a more realistic environment.





This scene taxed the video card quite a bit more then the first, the Ti4600 had trouble providing fluent gameplay even without any of the FSAA/AS settings enabled. The ATI kept the average frame rate nicely over the 60FPS mark, only when I cranked up the resolution to 1600x1200 it dropped to ~40FPS. The Ti4600 was running at ~15FPS at this setting...

No FSAA/AS

The ATI produces a clearer image





2x FSAA / 2x AS

The Ti4600 equals the ATI's No FSAA/AS quality when we enable these settings.

GTA3 Vice City :

Grand Theft Auto 3: Vice City is a third person racer/shooter, allowing you to cruise through a living city Review)

Performance :

This is a pure DX8 game, the Ti4600 held its own here quite well, 1280x1024 with 2x FSAA and 2x AF produced average frame rates of ~60 for the nVidia card, without any of the fancy FSAA/AF both video cards produced extremely fluent gameplay with 100+ FPS.



I had a hard time searching for differences between the two cards, and in the end I must confess that I found none. Even with the FSAA/AS enabled the image produced by both cards were undistinguishable

No FSAA/AF





2x FSAA / 2x AF

Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo is First Person Shooter which loads up Pixel Shader 2.0 for DX9 cards, and PS 1.2 for DX8.

Performance:

Now this is a game that requires a powerful GPU, it shows immediately when running the game on the Ti4600, FPS dips below 20FPS were frequent. The ATI kept the frame rate in the regions of 60FPS even when enabling FSAA/AF.
It took 1600x1200 2x FSAA / 2x AF to drop the XT's frame rate to ~30FPS. Impressive!



The same clarity difference is noticed here as with Chrome,

No FSAA/AF





2x FSAA / 2x AF





As with Chrome, reflections were better looking with the Radeon 9800XT, but apart from that no other differences were standing out.

Need for Speed Underground

Need for Speed Underground is a street racing game, using a multitude of visual effects to produce stunning scenes



Performance :

This game is playable @ 1280x1024 on the Ti4600 if you disable FSAA/AF, averaging ~40FPS, the ATI however runs at ~50FPS smoothly with 2xFSAA/2xAF.



1) GF4 No FSAA/AF
2) XT No FSAA/AF
3) GF4 2x FSAA / 2xAF









The reflections in-game on the car and the road are immediately noticeable, and it makes the game come more a life and realistic. With the Ti4600 the updates of the reflections on the car were lagging, with the Radeon they were up to date as it should be!

Call of Duty :

Call of Duty is a First Person Shooter powered by an enhanced version of the OpenGL Quake 3 engine. The scene I chose for the test is one of the most taxing in the game, Stalingrad, arrival with the boot at the harbour.

The texture detail was turned up the maximum, and this created some really good looking screenshots.

Performance :

1280x1024 was a bit too high for the Ti4600 with an average frame rate of 15-20, it was simply unplayable. The Radeon increased this number quite a bit and brought it around 40-50. Enabling FSAA/AF caused noticeable performance drops on both cards.

I was unable to find any difference in image quality, so I let you decide which one looks better, for me, it's a tie!


No FSAA/AF




2x FSAA / 2x AF

Far Cry Demo :

Far Cry is First Person Shooter with jaw dropping graphics, it uses a quite few DirectX 9 features.

Performance :

With the image quality set to HIGH at 1024x768, both cards were able to give fluent gameplay, up the point where you come face to face with an enemy, there the Ti4600's FPS drops to ~15FPS, while the Radeon XT doesn't stutter once. Enabling FSAA/AF makes the game crawl on both cards, the XT "leading" with 50% more FPS than the Ti4600. (10 fps vs. 5 fps)

The only scene where there was a noticeable difference between the two cards is when I applied the unofficial "water reflections" patch and stared over the ocean to the land, the reflections were more "pronounced" and visible on the XT than on the GF4. But nothing earth shocking.

Overclocking :

With the stock cooling installed I was able to push the core from 412Mhz to ~450Mhz, the memory went up from 365 to ~390Mhz. This translates in a hardly noticeable performance increase, but as it comes for free, I’m not complaining :)

Conclusion :

Powercolors fastest video card, powered by the ATI Radeon 9800XT, will upgrade your PC to a fully fledged gaming system, able to run even the most demanding games fluently. It's a nicely bundled with the upcoming Half Life 2 shooter in the form of a coupon, as well as one of the few DirectX titles around, Tomb Raider:AOD.

If you still have a DX8 video card you will see some improvements when it comes down to image quality when running games which utilise functionalities from the DirectX 9 suite, but nothing that will shock you. The performance however WILL, at certain moments during the games I played I experienced frame-rates up to 50% higher than the GF4 could deliver, and this coupled sometimes with an even clearer image.

The only downside to this killer-video card is the price tag. The Radeon 9800XT is a souped up version of the 9800 Pro which can be found at a more "wallet-friendly" price, without sacrificing performance too much (5-10%).


PRO
Extreme Performance
Silent Fan
TV-Out / Dual Monitor Support


CON
Price tag

I would to thank Amal from Eurobizz and Powercolor for giving us the opportunity to test this high end video card.

Questions/Comments: Forum thread