LOSTCIRCUITS

Conclusion

What started out as some sort of a science experiment and was originally rewarded with a rather dysfunctional graphics card turned into a huge success after all. In absence of a face to face comparison with a genuine ATI X800XT card, we can only speculate about the validity of our results, however, based on comparable data from other review sites, our frame rates appear right on the money.

This does not mean that the procedures outlined here will work in every instance, in fact we don't even have hard proof that the .1 moniker is a valid designator for a core that will be able to unlesh the power of all 16 pipelines without errors. However, the evidence is rather compelling and even if there is the caveat that a genuine RADEON X800XT may be a tad faster than what we have shown, it would still suffice to point out the 30% on average that we see in terms of performance increase.

I can already hear the criticism that the multimedia drivers cannot be loaded in this case but, so what? They will not be loaded in the case of an X800Pro card lacking the Rage Theater chip anyway and therefore, this argument may be correct but then, who cares. Bottom line is that it looks like there is a possibility to obtain the power of a RADEON X800XT for about US$300 and that is an awful lot of GPU power for the money. Finally, suffice it to say that different manufacturers will use different quality grades of the graphics core and that may be a very good reason to skip the very cheap offerings and, instead stick with one of the more expensive brands ... - like ASUS, which might turn out to be the least expensive way in the long run to save a lot of money.

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