Introduction

If you're on the upgrade path for a new graphics card, you're most likely paying much attention to ATI's line of popular Radeon products. If you've got many dollars to play with you're probably looking even closer at the recently introduced high-end Radeon 9800 XT. This is the refresh of the Radeon 9800 Pro before the next major release in the cycle from the folks at ATI.

The new Radeon 9800 XT offers new improvements over its older brother such as increased core and memory clock speeds as well as temperature monitoring, VPU Recovery for assistance when your system crashes and Overdrive technology which monitors the graphics cards and automatically overclocks for increased performance during game play. All these new features are just another feather in the cap for ATI and only helps reinforce their very strong presence in the graphics chip business over their rivals.

Today we have Power Color's vanilla Radeon 9800 XT with 256MB of DDR SDRAM onboard on the test bed. It is a very much no frills graphics card following the official reference design by ATI with the only thing varying being the package bundle - which yes, does include a voucher for Half Life II when it is released. Read on as we find out if it's worth spending the extra dollars and upgrading to the new 9800 XT over the older Radeon 9800 Pro work horse.

Let's begin!

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