Viper Lair just finished a review of the Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B X1800 XL. Man, that's a long name!

{mosgoogle}Video cards are still one of the fastest growing parts of the computer industry.  Where CPU speed has slowed down over the past few years, 'only' growing about 50% in the last year or so.  However video cards have increased in performance the quite highly with each successive generation. 

ATi video cards are currently considered the lower performance models at this moment, with nVidia's latest video cards gaining the preference of many of the enthusiast.  ATi has fairly recently released their latest products, of which some consider at bit too late to match nVidia's performance level.

Gigabyte, like most other motherboard manufacturers has diversified its product range, from its standard motherboards to barebones laptops to video cards.  They are a manufacturer of both nVidia and ATi based cards which allows them to provide the best of both worlds here.  Today we will look at one of their ATi based video cards.