ATI Radeon X1800 XT Evaluation
 

We take an in-depth look at how the new Radeon X1800 XT compares to the competition in eight games including Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. We tell you which card provides the best gaming experience. We also scrutinize the heat and noise produced by our contenders. This is a must-read for the video card or gaming enthusiast.

http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=ODc1

very nice review!
this goes to show that real world performance isn't any better on x1800xt then 7800 gtx, for more money, more heat and more noise as our Emperor JMke has stated all along, all hail his insight!


and it also goes to show that you NEED sli if you want to play quake4 or fear on your shiny new widescreen monitor at 1900*1200 resolution with at least 2*aa and 8*af :) you probably even need 2 512 mb gtx cards with higher 500-1400 clocks at the least :)
which our emperor did not acknowledge
;)

SLI should only be chosen as a last resort in my humble opinion. The technology is still very "young" and performance increases for double the cost are not quite there yet. When the increase of performance is in the 80-90% range (instead of 0-40%) then it'll become a valid choice for purchase.

at the moment SLI is a toy for rich people;)

btw the reason behind why you don't see a difference between High Texture Quality and Ultra Quality is simple. In Ultra Quality the textures are uncompressed and put into the videocard memory, while in HQ they are compressed first, however the compression does not result in a visible difference in quality :)


at what distance did they measure noise? they don't seem to mention it?

That is pretty loud; I just stuck my sound meter to a 80mm fan @3,000 at close distance like the one in the photo - 60dBA.

A 120mm 12V 2,200 rpm same close up distance 69dBA. It is loud; imagine having two cards together; it will pick up another 3-5 dBA from ~69.

yes thank you for the link... duh! but no mention of distance was made.. as I stated

From the photo - less than 5cm