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If you have ever laid your eyes
on any of Abit's O.T.E.S. equipped video cards, you probably
would have expected Abit to make a big splash with their
Radeon 9800 XT. Regrettably, in what seems like an
attempt to release an ATi powered card quickly, Abit adhered
strictly to the Radeon 9800 XT reference design with this
card, save for a
custom decal that graces the cooling apparatus...
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The Abit Radeon 9800XT 256MB |
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Strictly a Reference Design :( |
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It would be nearly impossible to
distinguish the Abit Radeon 9800 XT from an
ATi built card, or even
Sapphire's version of the 9800
XT for that matter, if it weren't for the Abit branded decal
on the fan shroud. This isn't necessarily a bad thing,
however, as the 9800 XT has proven time and again that it is
the current King of the 3D Hill, but we had hoped Abit
would do something truly special with their first Radeon
powered card. We won't go so far as to say we're
disappointed in Abit, but a "me too" reference card wasn't
what we thought they had in the works.
The Abit Radeon 9800 XT''s red PCB is identical
to an ATi built version. On the external plate, you'll
find a DVI connector, a DB15 connector and lastly an S-Video
out. Like other 9800 XTs, this connector configuration
gives users the ability to run a dual-monitor setup using
any combination of two outputs (1 CRT & 1 LCD or 1 TV &
1 CRT, etc.) The large, all copper cooling apparatus
consists of a heavy front plate with thin copper fins and a
near silent 80-mm fan, and a heat plate mounted on the rear of
the card directly behind the GPU. This system cools
not only the GPU, but the 4 RAM chips mounted on the front
and rear of the card (8 chips total). The cooling hardware is
held in place with two, front-mounted spring-loaded screws
on the obverse
and a metal clip on the reverse. We removed the clip and
screws to disassemble the cooler, and found an adequate
application of silver thermal paste on the GPU and simple
thermal pads for the RAM.
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In-Game Screenshots With The Abit Radeon 9800XT
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Where the 9800 XT Shines |
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Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo
Screen Shots
1024x768 | 4X AA | 16X Anisotropic Filtering
Before we got to the
nitty-gritty and benchmarked the Abit Radeon 9800 XT, we
spent some time playing a few popular games to get a feel
for the card's in-game image quality and "real world"
performance. We played with the recently released
Unreal Tournament 2004 demo, Max Payne 2 and the very fun
Need For Speed: Underground. If we left anti-aliasing
disabled, this card handled all three of these games with
ease. Gaming at 1600x1200 with all in-game options
maxed offered very smooth playable frame rates. We
also played these games at multiple AA and Aniso settings,
and didn't experience any significant slow-downs, until we
hit the higher resolutions (1280+) with the AA and Aniso
settings at their max. We've included some screen
shots from the UT2004 demo to give you an idea as to how the
game looks on the Abit Radeon 9800 XT. Even with JPEG
compression, the images look great.
The Test System, AquaMark3 & Halo
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