Introduction
Long known for their enthusiast targeted products, ABIT is one of the most respected and recognized names around. While their main claim to fame is and probably always will be their motherboards, they also offer a variety of other products that includes: Mini-PC systems, multimedia accessories, and, the focus of this review, video cards.
While ABIT has been pushing the envelope with regard to motherboard designs and features, their video card line has been somewhat lackluster and seems to have taken a back seat. They once pushed the graphics market as hard as they push the motherboard market, evidence of this is found in their video card cooling technology known as Outside Thermal Exhaust System (or OTES). OTES was used extensively on their now generally discontinued nVidia GeForce graphics cards, but the technology has yet to make an appearance on any of ABIT's ATI based cards. Maybe OTES was a feature born of necessity back then, but there are currently at least two other Add-In-Board partners who have been using a similar technology on their cards and have been getting a lot of positive feedback from users because of it.
With some of their newest cards it seems that ABIT is starting to put more attention into their graphics cards line-up, but the ABIT Radeon X800 Pro which I'll be looking at in this review is utterly reference.