PowerColor Radeon x800 Pro review

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So then here we are, in today's article we are basically discussing the x800 series. They are much discussed already. The release of NVIDIA's 6800 series is a strong one and where ATI has been dominate for the past two years, it now has a serious competing product. The series x800 was developed under codename R420 and is lined up against the 6800 series and manages to compete very well. The x800 Pro. A VPU built on a 0.13-micron fabrication process with 160 Million transistors. The Pro product has 12 pixel pipelines opposed to its bigger XT brother with 16. Make no mistake, both products have the same core yet the Pro version has 4 pipes disabled. I already noticed some interesting soft and hardmods on the web to enable these extra 4 pipes. Basically make sure you have the VIVO version and you have a good chance of making it an XT for free. The VPU furthermore has two pixel shader units per pipeline, the pipes are organized into four groups of four, six vertex shader units, four-way crossbar memory controller and 450 MHz Graphics DDR-3 memory.

See any differences with the 6800 here? No? Good... as indeed it's the same. Differences need to be found in transistor count (more for the GeForce due to SM3), architecture, the core frequency and memory bandwidth mostly.

I've placed a small overview of the competing products in this chart:

 
nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra ATI Radeon X800 XT ATI Radeon X800 Pro ATI Radeon 9800 XT Transistor Count 220 million 160 million 160 million 110 millionManufacturing Process 0.13-micron 0.13-micron, low-k dielectric 0.13-micron, low-k dielectric 0.15-micronCore Clock Speed 400MHz 520MHz 475MHz 413MHzPixel Pipes 16 16 12 8Texturing Units 16 16 12 8Vertex Pipelines 6 6 6 4Memory Interface 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit 256-bitMemory Clock Speed 1.1GHz DDR-3 1.1GHz DDR-3 900MHz DDR-3 730MHz DDR-2Peak Memory Bandwidth 35.2GB/sec 35.8GB/sec 28.8GB/sec 23.4GB/sec

Opposed to the GeForce 6 series ATI did not choose to support Shader Model 3 but uses 2.0b. This is being hotly debated, personally I would have loved to see SM3 included on the x800 series, current games however hardly support it. When they do, NVIDIA will gain an advantage in performance. There will be several titles out supporting Shader Model 3 among them Lord of the Rings; Battle for Middle-Earth, Stalker, Vampire: Bloodlines, Splinter Cell X, Driver 3, Grafan, Painkiller and more...

Bundled ItemsIn the box, we can take note of the fact that where others go cheap and include hardly any software, PowerColor is giving away a lot of fun stuff along with the card. The card comes with your usual cables and CDs, manual and finally the card in a black box. The CD bundle consists of the Hitman Contracts game, Counter Strike Source, CyberLink DVD software and the driver CD. Quite decent.

  • Radeon X800 Pro
  • S-Video Cable
  • Composite (RCA) Cable
  • DVI-I-to-VGA Connector
  • 4-pin Molex Power Connector
  • User Manual

    Software Bundle

  • ATI Drivers
  • CyberLink DVD Suite
  • Counter Strike Source
  • Hitman: Contracts

So everything you need to get started is present. Next to the card itself we'll see a plethora of cables, one of them a nice long Molex power supply cable, a bracket for the fan exhaust, S-Video VIVO cable, DVI to CRT/VGA adapter so that you are able to hook up 2 CRT VGA monitors to your card. Lastly what seems to be a HDTV cable.

Copyright 2004 - Guru3D.com
TUL deserves a pat on the back for a really decent bundle.

Board Design
Taking a closer look at the board, we can tell that TUL used the standard and, I must say, clean reference design PCB so do not expect miracles in tweaking. Now then, to my understanding I don't see any sense in describing the card in detail, as all cards seem to have the same reference design. It's a little speculative but I think all X800 boards are produced only in one place and only by ATI orders, vendors just apply their stickers. In the photo shoot look (on the next pages) closely on the board. you'll even notice a nice Canada stamp on it.

The Installation
It's really not hard to install a graphics card yourself nowadays. Especially with brands like ATI and NVIDIA, who use unified driver sets. If you have a really new product then make sure you have the latest drivers on your HD. First uninstall your current graphics card's drivers carefully, this is very important especially if the older graphics card was from a different chipset manufacturer. Now power down the PC and pull out the power cable. Insert the graphics card in the slot, secure it with a screw, connect the monitor and boot up windows, run the driver installation, then restart and you are set to go. That's all. Also important, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX (9.0c) installed. If you experience compatibility issues, please make sure you installed the latest version of your mainboard drivers, have a look in our download section I'd say.

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