johng Blog

I have been using the new graphics card for a few days now so it’s as good a time as any to post a few thoughts up.

It’s a big bastard that’s for sure. It’s two PCI slots wide, hangs over my motherboard and is heavy as hell. If you have got room for it then it’s a nice snug fit but those with smaller cases might want to wait for the lower powered cards to come out. With that said it’s nowhere near as loud as I had been led to believe even with that large heat sink. In my case I barely notice the difference when idle to my old GeForce 7900 GT, it’s only in games when the fan kicks in but if you have the volume up your not going to notice. The fan/heat-pipe kicks a tremendous amount of heat out the back of the system and is probably the most effective I have owned.

Most importantly of all though are the drivers and their stability. Using the latest catalyst drivers for Vista 32-bit has been a dream compared to the Nvidia hell I have been in for the last few months. Stalker runs great, HL2 Lost Coast looks amazing (both maxed out) and Aero performance is smooth and glitch free.

The Lost Planet DX10 demo is out there somewhere so I need to give that a try and I am definitely looking forward to playing many of the PC games I have missed over the last couple of months. Crysis looks amazing and I really feel that will be the big test for this card.

This card can also pump out full 1080p HD over HDMI with audio. That is huge. The 2400 and 2600 cards due out next month are going to be perfect media center cards for this reason alone and with the drop in CPU prices I feel a dedicated TV box coming on.

So in short - it’s nice to have you back ATI, it was a long time coming but at least you can write and maintain decent drivers.