This is Day 3 of our Cebit report with news from ABIT, Albatron and Gigabyte.
Read
Day 1 and
Day 2 here.
ABIT
Video Cards
ABIT had several innovative ATI video card solutions to show.
First of all the ABIT
R9550XTurbo-Guru:
Sorry for the image. The one I took was too blurry, so I had to use one from the ABIT Website.
This video card is the only 9550 that allows overclocking without running any special drivers.
As you may know, ATI added some overclocking protection for the Radeon 9550 to their Catalyst Drivers, starting with version 3.4. You can change clock speeds, but the clocks are returned to default after a few seconds or when a game is started. So you had to use a modified driver or flash a 9600 bios to your card to be able to overclock.
See the green jumper in the picture? It is used to swap between two video biosses stored on the card. One bios is the original 9550 bios, the other one is a 9600 bios.
This is a very clever way of ABIT to get around ATI's limitations. ATI says that their partners may not make any changes to the video bios or drivers in regards to overclocking.
What ABIT did to their 9550 does not violate any ATI regulations, "it's just a backup bios for the user in case something goes wrong". Nice one, ABIT.
Also this card has ABIT's uGuru Chip on-board which allows advanced monitoring and change of core and memory voltage. ABIT will soon announce an X800 based product using the uGuru chip. My guess would be an X800 XL with uGuru.
Also powered by uGuru is the
RX700 Pro-Guru. The card uses the same uGuru chip as the other video cards. No dual Bios here, it is not needed to overclock.
The ABIT
RX800 XL-256EDVIO is "just another" X800 XL. Only changes from the standard design are the nice cooler and the changed PCB color. As mentioned earlier, I'm betting ABIT will soon announce a uGuru version of this board.
The
RX800 XL-256EDVIO (AGP) is one of the last high-end AGP video cards coming from ABIT.