Another RADEON Hits Town

Today, top-notch graphics cards for gaming can easily fetch prices up to S$1K but fortunately not all of them belong to that upper echelon price bracket. For about S$800 or less, ATI RADEON 9800 Pro VPU based products can deliver performance somewhat similar to the NVIDIA cards priced at S$1K (depending on situation, game and settings). Without a doubt, the RADEON 9800 Pro provides a better value for the high performance graphics card segment. To make the deals even sweeter, there has been stiff competition amongst the various ATI graphics card vendors as brands such as PowerColor and GigaCube have lately been quite aggressive in terms of branding and price.

Having reviewed the PowerColor recently, today we review GigaCube’s top graphics card product based on the ATI RADEON 9800 Pro VPU. For those who are unaware, this isn’t a Gigabyte graphics card or its subsidiary. GigaCube is a product brand name of Info-Tek Corp whose core concentration is in 3D graphics/ multimedia products and is a major contract electronics manufacturer. When Info-Tek became an ATI Add-In-Board (AIB) partner, automatically GigaCube became one of the major suppliers of ATI VPU-based graphics card products. With more competition, consumers stand to gain better product packages or pricing, which is an inevitable byproduct. So let's see if the GigaCube could put up a sweet proposition for consumers.

This is an older box design without GigaCube’s logo, which should be printed towards the left side of the box front where the ‘Powered By ATI’ logo is.

This is the GigaCube logo.

Detailed below are the technica specifications for the GC-R9800-PRO-C3 128MB, which is the exact model number of the GigaCube product in this review. You will find that it is almost identical to other RADEON 9800 Pro products as we present more details in the following pages.