ATi Radeon X600XT

This PCI Express X600 graphics card from ATI has 128 MB of DDR memory. Gamers can take full advantage of its potential for mind-blowing graphics and smooth rendering, to play all the latest games. Being 16x PCI Express, it sends and receives data simultaneously at thrice the speed of the current 8x AGP. The card has dual video connectors for connecting to the two monitors. Graphics cards always have issues with memory bandwidth; to overcome this, the ATi Radeon chip includes the HyperZ technology. This improves memory bandwidth efficiency without the added cost of exotic embedded or proprietary memory technologies.

 By eliminating this key bottleneck, the final barrier to realistic, real-time 3D gives full-screen 3D acceleration in true color.We evaluated its performance on a Gigabyte (GA-K8NXP-SLI) chipset motherboard, housed with the AMD Athlon 64 2.2 GHz, 512 MB DDR and 40 GB hard disk. We compared its results with an Asus AX 600XT and found minor performance improvements (see table). In Quake3 Arena and Unreal Tournament, the graphics showed a small drop in performance, but it showed an improvement in 3D mark 2003 by a few points. 

The Bottom Line: The card is a good performer at an affordable price tag of Rs 9,000.

Anoop Mangla and Sanjay Majumder