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Up
Close Continued...
The Radeon X850XT GPU. Impressive
looking isn't it?
The bottom of the
X850XTPE.
Installation and Setup
Even though they are one of the most expensive upgrades you can
do, video cards are extremely easy to install. I went from an
X600XT to the X850XTPE in about 5 minutes. Simply power down,
remove the old card, install the new card, and power up. Just be
sure to install the latest and greatest drivers from ATi. I
downloaded and installed ATi's Catalyst v5.2 drivers. While I'm on
the subject of drivers, I left all driver settings at defaults
throughout testing. This way it is easier for our readers to
reproduce our results.
Test System
For this review I'll be
using a test system based on ABIT's AA8 DuraMAX motherboard and P4
3.4GHz CPU.
|
Hardware |
Model |
|
Motherboard: |
ABIT AA8 DuraMAX |
|
CPU: |
Intel Pentium 4 LGA-775
3.4GHz (800MHz)
Overclocked to 3.9GHz
(17 x 230MHz)
CPU Provided by:
Computer Geeks |
|
Memory: |
Wintec AmpX
2x512mb
PC2-5400 DDR2
4-4-4-10 |
CPU-Z snapshot showing the test system
settings.
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.
