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Introduction
The last time I looked at a cut down version of high-end RADEON was with X800 GT from PowerColor. ATI had launched that particular SKU last year to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT and 6800LE series of cards. This year we have RADEON X1800 GTO going against GeForce 7600's and X1900 GT later this summer. ATI's X1800 GTO came in late to the game, it's been delayed more than once and was supposed to be available at launch sometime in March. On the other side, NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 was going at full force scoring major points and gaining trust among users.
Anyhow, Tul along other AIBs were first to ship GTOs for masses. Better late than never, I have PowerColor X1800 GTO on the bench for you to check out. Some of you might have already heard of GTO mods, but most of the time it's impossible because of laser cuts which disable 1 quad. So how do they do it you ask? Well, some partners did not get much love from ATI on getting those laser locked GTO chips. Instead they've used leftover XL GPUs, flashed the cards with reworked BIOS and voilà! -- a branded GTO. Now if you have the "special" card (check techpowerup.com on how to identify it) you just use this PowerColor X1800 XL BIOS, flash your board and enjoy 16 pipelines!
That should do it for the intro before I get to the benchmarks and other good stuff right? Ah, almost forgot...
For those not in the know Tul Corporation is a Tier-1 provider of ATI-based graphic cards. The company is also a leader in providing motherboards and barebone systems. So what about PowerColor?
PowerColor is a consumer brand focused on providing cutting-edge graphics card products to retail customers. Our goal for the Tul brand is to be the industry's number one provider of technology product solutions. Our goal for the PowerColor brand is to be the world's number one brand of graphics cards. PowerColor is in effect owned by Tul Corporation, however the brands are operated independently of each other.
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