GeCube RX800XL
Uniwise
400/490 MHz
ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3Core Clock : 398 MHz
Memory Clock : 492 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)
Overall Score: 90 points
While it might look different due to it's colors and cutout, the GeCube RX800XL Uniwise has a cooling solution similar to the ASUS EAX800XL. There are some differences which is a definite improvement. For one, the memory chips on the back of the card is cooled by a plate. It still uses paddings between the heatsink and the chips themselves. The back plate is perforated in several places to allow hot air from the components under the plate to escape. Another improvement is fan control: depending on whether or not you're running a 3D application (and our guess, core temperature), the fan will spin down and up accordingly. It allows the GeCube RX800XL Uniwise to run inaudibly when viewing the desktop and spinning to full speed when you run 3D games. It does produce noticeable noise at full speed, with a slightly higher pitch though, but not really noticeable on a closed case.
The GeCube RX800XL still features both analog and DVI output, one point analog monitor users will likely appreciate since they can use the standard DVI to analog dongle bundled for dual monitor setup. For additional output, you can connect your RCA / coax and HDTV with a bundled cable (approximately 1,5 meters or 5 feet). Since the cable is essentially an coax cable with HDTV extensions, you might not get the same quality should you use a dongle so you might have to directly connect the extension to the TV output connector on the card and use your own HDTV cable to connect the extension to your TV. There's no video input capabilities, so it should cost less than the other cards here.
As for the bundle, GeCube has a passably good bundle: one game (Counter Strike: Condition Zero) and one application (Cyberlink PowerDVD). There's no utility what so ever, which is a shame since it would be good to slow down the fan a bit under load to avoid that high pitched sound.
Gigabyte
X800XL Silent Pipe
400/490 MHz
ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3Core Clock : 398 MHz
Memory Clock : 492 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)
Overall Score: 87.5 points
For the truly silent solution, Gigabyte's X800XL is worth a look. This card uses three pieces of heatsink, each of them in contact with each other. If you closely at the heatsink in the front, you'll notice that it's actually made of two plates - one that is in direct contact with the core and another on top of it. The inner plate is connected with the plate on the back of the card via two big heatpipes. In total, this heatsink features the most heat dissipation area of all the cards, a necessity since it lacks active cooling. Even so, we noticed several areas where Gigabyte (and Zalman) could've made some improvements. For one, the mounting isn't good, particularly the back plate. Rather than just relying on the lock, the screw should poke the plate on the back - it would have a more solid installation (not easily movable by accident). A padding on the screws (very much like the Alpha 8945) would keep the plate from actually touching the board (or components). Second, the heatpipe shouldn't be placed between the plate and the memory chips. The default position will just transfers heat from the core to the memory chips. So instead of cooling them down, it's actually heating them up. Third, a more flushed, direct contact between the heatsink and the memory is preferred. The memory on the bottom of the board is barely covered by the padding and memory chips on the front of the card is not touching the heatsink at all!. Thankfully, during testing we encounter no problems what so ever. Even after a torture test of half and hour of Doom 3, we noticed no slowdown or artifacts. We did noticed the heatpipe and the back plate to be very hot - reason enough to get a slow spinning 8 cm fan to cool it down. But even without the fan, the card just kept on going without problems and artifacts.
Just like the GeCube RX800XL, Gigabyte's X800XL still features both analog and DVI output, with a the standard DVI to analog dongle bundled. Besides having RCA / coax and HDTV output, this card also features video input, again with the use of Rage Theater chip. Unfortunately, the dongle has a very short cable (about 20 cm or 8 inches), so you probably will quite often reach to the back of your PC to connect cables or switch the dongle output between HDTV and SDTV.
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As for the bundle, Gigabyte has the most bundle - two games (Thief: Deadly Shadows and Joint Operations) plus two applications (Cyberlink's PowerDVD and PowerDirector) for video playback and capturing. There's also Gigabyte's own VTuner2, which much to our disappointment does not feature any hardware monitoring again. We think that hardware monitoring is essential for passively cooled peripherals, even more so than actively cooled peripherals so you should invest on some third party software or hardware for health monitoring with this card.
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