Gecube X850 XT Uniwise review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 17 May 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: David Ludlow

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

We've seen ATI's X850 XT before, but GeCube has a different take on it with the Uniwise version of the card.

Rather than the two-slot, exhaust port reference design, GeCube has gone for an altogether sleeker approach and built a single-slot PCI-E card instead.

Small often means loud, as a more powerful fan is needed to do the cooling. Fortunately, this isn't the case here. The X850 XT Uniwise is surprisingly quiet and certainly won't be heard above the normal level of PC noise.

Unusually, the card comes with two DVI-I interfaces, so if you're lucky enough to own two LCD monitors with digital inputs, you'll be able to make the most of them both. GeCube provides a single DVI-to-analogue converter in the box. There's also full VIVO capability, so you can use the card to capture analogue video and output a signal to a TV.

GeCube has opted for a standard X850 XT rather than the more powerful Platinum Edition (PE). This means the core runs at 520MHz (the PE runs at 540MHz), while the 256MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 1.08GHz (the PE's RAM runs at 1.17GHz).

In practice this made little difference in our tests. The X850 XT Uniwise scored 12,433 in 3DMark03 and 71.2fps in Doom 3 running at 1,024x768. Bumping the resolution up to 1,600x1,200 produced a very impressive score of 60.9fps in Doom 3. It shows that the card handles high resolutions and high detail settings with ease. There are currently no games that will stress it.

This card is well suited to small cases in which a two-slot card simply won't fit and is one of the fastest cards available, but it's also very expensive. If you want the best in a small package, it's a good choice. However, our favourite card is still GeCube's X800 XL, which has similar performance for a bit less money.

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