As time marches on and the seasons change some things are predictable. Take springtime for instance. A time when deep rooted emotions start to stir, when the Earth itself is caught up in a wave of rebirth and vitality, and when a young man's (and woman's) thoughts turn to… lust. Lust for the fastest, most powerful graphic processors the planet has ever seen at a consumer level as ATI and nVidia announce their newest generation of products. What? You thought I was talking about something else? What else could I have…. Oh, OH! You need to go to this link if that is what you thought I was talking about! Now that we have hoisted ourselves out of the gutter, let's get back to the subject at hand, Video Cards.

Every spring, well spring here in North America and Europe , for the past few years ATI and nVidia announce their “next big thing” in graphics processing units, or GPUs. For 2004 this was the X800 and 6800 families of processors with the X800XT Platinum Edition being the top of the heap for ATI and the FX6800 Ultra holding that position for nVidia. While both of these chips were announced in the spring, getting a hold of cards based upon them has been nothing if not difficult. Production of cards is finally, now at the end of the summer, starting to catch up with demand.

Needless to say, when HIS approached us with an offer to review one of the latest cards we jumped. Originally they offered to send us an Excalibur X800Pro IceQ II, but somewhere along the lines things got mixed up and they sent us the Excalibur X800XT IceQ II VIVO Special Edition. Trust me, there were no complaints from us. Here we had what is arguably one of the fastest gaming cards on the planet, we were happy.