Top of the line performance, Gigabye scores again with another passive video card

When I build computers, I have two requirements; performance and silence. In the case of the Gigabyte GV-RX80XL256V I received both.

I originally chose this card because I needed a PCI-E 16x ATI compliant card which I wanted to be as quiet as possible. As a passively cooled video card is obviously silent, I chose this one from Gigabyte because they make the highest quality passive cards available.

I spent quite a bit of time “testing” the card out today on UT2004, HL2 and Doom3 just to see what I could push it to do. I had UT2004, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Far Cry, and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow at the highest settings and it performed beautifully on all of them. Doom3 and HL2 I also pushed to their upper limits with ease. The X800 XL struggled just a little bit when I maxed out the settings of Doom3. That is perfectly acceptable to me anyhow as the graphics are meant to kill as many video cards as possible just to prove they can make a game more powerful than your system.

Though the card is fairly large it will easily fit inside all but the smallest computer cases. The card is true to ATI specifications in design and performance. The main feature of the Gigabyte X800 XL is the massive heatsink and heatpipes that adorn the core and memory on both sides of the card. The copper heatsinks evenly distribute the heat throughout the card allowing the air moving through the case to cool the card. These devices make the X800 XL incredibly heavy and it would be wise for anyone mounting this card horizontally to make sure the card is screwed into the case well.

The Gigabyte X800 XL stays remarkably cool! I used EVEREST Home Edition to report my temps as ATI Tool does not for some reason work in conjunction with my X800 XL and the Xpress 200 chip on my mainboard. When the computer is idling at 38C, the card core rests at 48C with an ambient temp of 43C. On load it while I was playing games it reported temperatures between 62C and 71C even on the highest of graphics settings! I then used rthdrbl to stress the card's capabilities and it hovered around 79C for hours. A passively cooled card operating at maxed out settings staying at 80C or under seems to be nothing short of fantastic and I am incredibly well pleased with it’s performance. The card cools down very quickly as well, dropping from it’s on load temps after several hours of gaming to idle temps in less than two minutes.