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Well now, the graphics card is clocked way higher then was rumored, then again it also has less pixel pipelines then the rumored twelve. My friends, the graphics core runs at 473 MHz, which is rather high. When we look at the memory clock we see it's also pretty impressively clocked at 493 MHz (x2 DDR) 256-bit. If you keep these high clocks in mind and consider the fact that this product has 8 pixel pipelines, then it should definitely keep up with the GeForce 6600 GT. Let's see that RivaTuner detects.

$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : RADEON X800GT
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 1002 (ATI)
$0000000002 Device ID : 554b
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff ATI specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0900000000 Graphics core : R423 (8x1)
$0900000002 Memory bus : 256-bit
$0900000001 Memory type : DDR3 SGRAM
$0900000003 Memory amount : 256MB
$0900000004 Core clock : 472.500MHz
$0900000005 Memory clock : 492.750MHz (985.500MHz effective)

Interesting, confusing, you name it... when we fire up Rivatuner the Device_ID for this product that is returned is actually $0000000002 Device ID : 554b and that ID is actually the R423, which we all know and love from the X800 XL. There's also an XT build on 0.11 micron that is the R430 and basically the closest comparison to this graphics core.

Now when you install the Catalyst 5.7 drivers the card will install properly as Radeon x800 GT. But there's that device ID again .. 554B and the Catalyst driver thinks it's an x800 SE core and hey now we have something interesting.

So then, armed with all that memory bandwidth here and combined with that higher then expect core frequency we have a lot of geometric muscle. But hey, specifications may vary depending on the manufacturer. Earlier the least powerful product in the RADEON X800 family was the RADEON X800 SE, which also featured graphics chip with 8 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines, but was clocked at 425MHz and had a way higher price.

The DeviceID kept me puzzling though. Initially I figured this to be identified as R430. But hey, details... there's only one way to find out eh? Open her up!

There we go, even more mystification. That's the same core as the x850 series has. Oh brother, would it be possible to enable 12 or even 16 pipes on this core? Or is this simply a R480 product with two non operational quads (4 or 8 unusable pipes) ?

The BIOS and drivers need an update for sure for the new Device ID. Anyway back to the test, performance looks notable. The card should be as fast as the GeForce 6600 GT, giving ATI a much more potent mid-range competitor than the Radeon X700 family with it's way lower memory bandwidth (128-bit memory).

Small sidenote, the specification for the 128 MB model might be way different! I'll update this page once I have more info on that one but as it looks right now that version will only have (2x350) 700 MHz GDDR memory.

Let's have a look in a simplistic overview: