Introduction

In the past four months, we’ve seen a lot of action in the 3D graphics market, and we’re not talking about ATI and NVIDIA’s latest graphics products either. For the first time in several years, it’s actually the third-party board manufacturers that are stealing all the headlines.

ABIT 9800 XT meets eVGA 5950 Ultra

9800 XT compared to 9800 PRO 256MB

It all started at Computex 2003, held in September due to last summer’s outbreak of SARS. At the show Gigabyte told us that going forward they’d be manufacturing graphics products with NVIDIA and ATI graphics chips inside; previously ATI was their sole graphics supplier (after they’d defected from NVIDIA the year before). ASUS followed shortly thereafter, announcing their RADEON 9800 XT and 9600 XT products on ATI’s launch day, and following that announcement up with several follow-on products based on ATI’s RADEON 9200 and SE lines, earlier this month they even released a 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card.

These announcements were big news for the industry, which had been locked in exclusives and other manufacturing deals for years. ATI had their group of partners, and NVIDIA had theirs, there was no mixing between them, each player stuck with the same team for better or worse.

Now ABIT is the latest card manufacturer to announce that they will be partnering with ATI.

Both boards sport the same design

Can you see the differences?

ABIT, like ASUS and Gigabyte, is probably best known for its motherboards, but they’ve actually been in the graphics business for a few years now, with their first products dating back to NVIDIA’s GeForce 256 GPU. They’ve really made a name for themselves in graphics in the past 16 months however, with the launch of their GeForce4 Ti 4200 OTES line.

OTES brought heat pipe cooling to the graphics card well before NVIDIA made it famous (or should we say infamous) with GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. In fact, when we talked with NVIDIA about FX Flow’s design prior to GeForce FX 5800 Ultra’s launch, it was referred to as OTES 2 in origin.

Not only did ABIT’s OTES board sport exotic cooling, ABIT also juiced up the core and memory clock frequencies. We were so enamored with ABIT’s GeForce4 Ti 4200 OTES that we awarded it our Editor’s Choice Award. Since then OTES has basically put ABIT on the map in the graphics world in much the same way their SoftMenu BIOS has made them legendary among motherboard manufacturers.

This sounds like the perfect solution for spicing up the ATI add-in card market doesn’t it? Let’s see!