Introduction

Gigabyte's Radeon X800 Pro AGP 8x card was built and designed for the gamer in mind. Based on the Pro variant of Ati's R420 processor with its 12 pixel pipelines, six vertex shaders and DirectX 9.0b support, the card, at the very least, has many of the pre-requisites to get the job done. Additionally, the processor has 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory at its disposal, which it can access via a 256 bit memory interface. Gigabyte adheres to Ati's specifications, setting the memory frequency to at 900 MHz (DDR) and the graphics processor to 475 MHz.

While the card's layout is based closely on the usual Ati reference design, Gigabyte tries to set itself apart from the competition with its cooler. Two blue LEDs are installed behind the semi-transparent fan, making for some interesting lighting effects for transparent cases. Since the fan's blades are not completely transparent, the glow flickers, instead of being constant.

The card's layout is based on ATi's reference design. The cooling solution is also similar to ATi's, but it is slightly larger and comes with two LEDs.

The fan is laudably quiet as it cools the memory modules and graphics processor.