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Gigabyte X1900XTX
650/775 MHz

ATI Radeon X1900XTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 648 MHz
Memory Clock : 774 MHz (1548 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 90 points

This is actually the second time around the Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX make its way into our hands. The first time was several weeks ago for our Radeon X1900XTX review. Thankfully, there's nothing missing inside the box. You'll find the all the necessary accessories and the graphics card tucked away pretty neatly inside. You'll find the usual fanfare of cables - HDTV, composite, S-Video, video input / output - in addition to two DVI to analog dongles. Now here's the interesting part, it seems that the 6 pin ATX power cables is an optional accessory, so you may or may not get it, depending on where you live and purchase the card from. Thankfully, the local distributor here assured us that they will be including the power cables inside the box. So, it would be wise to check with your local Gigabyte representative / distributors to see whether or not you will get one if you decide to buy this card.

The must have CDs are all there - a driver CD which include a DVD playback software  plus an additional CD with MediaShow to utilize the video input capabilities of the card. You'll also get two games - Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Xpand Rally. A little bit outdated, but it's better than nothing. Unlike their previous graphics card products, the Gigabyte Radeon X1900XTX does not include any proprietary utilities, so you'll have to resort to third party utilities such as ATI Tool if you want to overclock the card or use the Overdrive feature inside the Catalyst Control Center.

In a way, Gigabyte's Radeon X1900XTX is a pretty standard card. It may not have more in terms in bundles, but it came with all the necessary accessories. Of course, like we said earlier, if you need the 6 pin ATX power cable, contact your local distributor on whether or not the cable is a standard package or an optional accessory. While you can easily get the cable from any store selling PC components, it would be a real time saver to have it inside the box.

Sapphire X1900XTX
650/775 MHz

ATI Radeon X1900XTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 648 MHz
Memory Clock : 774 MHz (1548 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 92 points

This is actually the first time we tested a Sapphire graphics card and we're quite pleased with what Sapphire had to offer with their Radeon X1900XTX. It's no Toxic, but it has all the necessary accessories and provide some extra flexibility in bundles. First of, the accessories. You'll find the standard HDTV, composite, S-Video and video input / output cables inside, of course, a 6 pix ATX power cable is also included. There's also two DVI to analog dongles if you want to hook up two analog monitors. Even though it has the smallest box of the three, Sapphire manages to have a very neat packaging despite the fact that it only use two layers of foam to protect the graphics card.

As per usual, there's a driver CD and two applications CD - Cyberlink's PowerDVD and PowerDirector for DVD playback and video capture / editor purposes. You'll also find a DVD with four games inside: Brothers in Arms, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Richard Burns Rally and Tony Hawk's Underground. These are all full games, but with each card, you'll get two activation keys, one for each game. It's up to you to choose which one you like the most. What's so great about this is the flexibility. If you should ever want to buy another card, perhaps for another PC or maybe a Crossfire setup, you can use the additional two keys for the other two games. So you'll end up with four games instead of two copies of two games. Even if you only buy a single card, you can at least play the other two games to see whether or not you like them or not.

In this regard, we think Sapphire has the best bundle, though it lack the total number of game bundles the ASUS EAX1900XTX has. It also comes standard with a 6 pin ATX power cable, which is a necessity if you have a power supply that does not have one. Of course, this differences are small, but they are worth noting. If you already have a power supply with a 6 pix ATX power cables, then you should consider other factors, such as price and support.

Performance

As usual, we'll be focusing on performance under default settings and 4x AA with 16x AF. Since all of these cards are basically the same, we expect very little difference between them, if any. Due to a technical difficulty, there won't be any results from F.E.A.R, but performance wise it shouldn't be that much different to the results we got in our Radeon X1900XTX review.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.2 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled.These results are in frame rate per second.

Standard settings

The results:

As we expected, there's very little difference between the cards. If there are any differences, they can be attributed to normal variations between runs (1-2 fps). More so here, since we're basically system limited with the Radeon X1900XTX, even with AA and AF enabled. You can also see the cards behaving in a similar manner - at 1280 x 1024 we begin to see a slight dip in performance with AA and AF and this becomes more noticeable at 1600 x 1200.  You can also see  that we didn't went lower than the minimum fps of around 70 fps, even at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. The lower average frame rates is more affected by the lower maximum fps rather than the minimum fps.

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