At the time of writing the GeCube X850XT uses the most powerful ATI graphics chip that money can buy, the Radeon X850XT. This is all about to change, of course, as any day now ATI will launch the Radeon X1800 to regain the ground that it has lost to Nvidia and its mighty GeForce 7800GTX.

This makes it a little tricky to get the correct perspective on the GeCube X850XT, as it's an incredibly impressive graphics card that has a great deal of history behind it. During development the Radeon X850XT was codenamed R480, and it was directly developed from the X800 Pro (R423), the 9800XT (R360), the Radeon 9800 (R350) and right back to the Radeon 9700 (R300).

Besides anything else this means that the GeCube doesn't fully support the features of DirectX 9.0c but instead has to settle for DirectX 9.0b, which isn't the end of the world but it does look bad on the spec sheet. The X850XT uses 16 pixel pipelines and six vertex pipelines with a huge core speed of 520MHz, plus DDR3 memory with an effective speed of 1.08GHz and a 256-bit memory controller.

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The core speed is about 100MHz higher than you'll find in an Nvidia graphics card yet GeCube has managed to build the X850XT in a single slot design which uses a copper heatsink that contains a heatpipe to dissipate the heat more effectively. The fan is slightly larger than normal at 65mm diameter which helps the GeCube to run reasonably quietly, yet it also remains cool during even the most intense 3D use.

The card uses the six-pin PCI Express power connector that we are becoming accustomed to seeing, but if you don't have a suitable power supply you'll find a PCI-E power adapter, as well as a TV cable which splits to offer S-Video and coaxial inputs and outputs, extension S-Video and coaxial cables and an RGB cable.

You also get a software package which consists of CounterStrike Condition Zero, PowerDVD and PowerDirector for the asking price. But what, we hear you ask, is the performance like? Well we're glad you asked.

The GeCube X850XT is fast. Fast, that is, by the standards of the GeForce 6800, but unfortunately Nvidia has moved the goalposts with the new GeForce 7800. The X850XT has about 80 percent of the performance of the 7800GT which sells for a similar price, and about 70 percent of the 7800GTX which sells for rather more. You can overclock the GeCube by ten percent easily enough, but the 7800GT overclocks by between ten and 20 percent which makes the gap even larger.

Make no mistake, the GeCube card has the power to play any modern game very effectively indeed, but it quite clearly marks the end of one era, while we can expect the Radeon X1800 to mark the beginning of the next.

The GeCube X850XT is a superb graphics card from a generation that has just drawn to a close. It can't compete with the GeForce 7800GT so we suggest that you wait for the Radeon X1800, which is imminent, unless you are offered a substantial discount in which case we would take it with both hands.