Power Color X1800 GTO: Cable-free Crossfire Explored Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

If you've read our Sapphire X1800 GTO review from last month you're already aware of where the GTO stands performance wise in both ATI's lineup as well as NVIDIA's. ATI have positioned their card slightly above the 7600 GT in both performance and price, and though there are some tradeoffs, the X1800 GTO often leads the 7600 GT, especially with filtering enabled. Power Color has sent us their X1800 GTO card which is specced identically to the Sapphire version, albeit with a different cooler. To add some meat to this article however, we will be testing both cards in Crossfire in a number of configurations to see how ATI's recently implemented cable-less Crossfire support fares.

Crossfire has not had nearly the market penetration that SLI has, and has taken alot longer to sort out its teething problems than SLI did when it first launched. Although, with the recent development of cableless Crossfire with X1800 GTO cards, it would appear as if the technology is maturing to the point where it can be looked at comparatively to an SLI setup in terms of usability. The big, stiff Crossfire cable and the specific Crossfire board requirements that usually accompany the implementation have kept many users away, leading them to the quick and compatible dual-GPU solution from the green camp. The promise of no cables with the May revision of the Catalyst driver sounds good, although we are a little concerned over possible bandwidth issues. We will be testing the cards with cables, without cables, and without cables on a dual 8x board configuration further on in the article.


The first order of business however, is the card from Power Color. The card is nearly identical to the Sapphire version we reviewed last month, although the different cooler choice on the retail card we received from Power Color is something needing to be looked into. While the press shot above indictates the same cooler as we received, all of the other Power Color GTO's we've seen feature the same cooler as seen here. Keep reading for more.