Radeon X800 XL review -
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Product type: Graphics card
Manufacturer: ATI
Website: www.ati.com
MSRP: 299 USD
Seek best price for products of this type.
Whether you noticed it or not, December was a pretty important month for ATI. The entire x800 series basically had a refresh making the fastest even faster and next to that they have been filling some gaps in the market. Today we will be talking about a product that feature wise is the same as last weeks tested Radeon x850 XT PE. There are two distinct differences though, firstly the most important factor, the price as the product today is no less than 250 USD cheaper and targeted at a 300 USD price. Secondly, the big difference of course is performance. Still I do prefer this product over the x850 XT PE. Why you ask? Simple, this is affordable and considering the framerates it can achieve in games this is a hell of an attractive buy. Today dear friends we will be talking about ATI's new Radeon x800 XL.
The Radeon x800 XL is a new high-end product yet within that segment on the lower and thus more affordable region.
The little ogre was manufactured under codename R430 and is actually built on the smaller 0.11 micron fabrication process. The product is, of course, purely intended for the PCI-Express platform. Why not AGP you ask, as there surely is a market for it. Well, as is seems ATI is not ready for it just yet, so I don't expect it anytime soon. They are working on an AGP solution though, under codename Rialto to be precise. Yet it's just not finished, there's a big AGP market out there waiting on this for real.
Let's place everything in a nice overview:
Chip | Pixel Pipelines | Graphics Core Frequency |
Memory Frequency | |
Radeon X800 | R430 | 12 | 400 MHz | 350 MHz |
Radeon X800 Pro | R423 | 12 | 475 MHz | 450 MHz |
Radeon X800 XL | R430 | 16 | 400 MHz | 500 MHz |
Radeon X800 XT | R423 | 16 | 500 MHz | 500 MHz |
Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition | R423 | 16 | 520 MHz | 560 MHz |
Radeon X850 Pro | R480 | 12 | 520 MHz | 540 MHz |
Radeon X850 XT | R480 | 16 | 520 MHz | 540 MHz |
Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition | R480 | 16 | 540 MHz | 590 MHz |
With these new cards around the corner it is rather unclear what the future is for the Radeon x800 Pro and XT, but one can assume that the new chips inserted into the x800/850 product range will slowly phase out those "older" products. The 'older' x800 Pro and XT's were and still are very hard to get as yields are bad. So if you ask me, I'd say (but it's just a guess) that the R423 chip has been revised for better yields, and thus will lead to a higher (better) production rendering the previous R423 products obsolete, but let's stick to facts.
With all that info in mind let's have a look ATI's new Radeon x800 XL, which will possibly be a very attractive purchase for most of you as it offers nice performance versus a nice price.
Radeon x800 XL, photographed in a slightly teasing way.
Today's tested product is the shaggy Radeon X1950 Pro which comes with the newer IceQ3 cooling solution; a review on ATI's latest 12-pipe mid-range product which obviously was based off the R580 silicon, and is quite frankly a very credible graphics card as you'll learn in this article. The card features 36 Pixel Shaders units. And for roughly $219-239 you can pickup the 256MB version already.
Radeon X1650 XT & X1950 Pro & Crossfire
Primarily this is a Radeon X1650 XT Crossfire article, yet with included X1950 Pro Crossfire results as well. Ever since NVIDIA released the GeForce 7600 GS/GT cards earlier this year ATI has had a very rough time delivering a product that offers the same performance. They constantly were close but not close enough. ATI worked hard to finish up its new 80 nanometer products and despite a delay of all the 80 nanometer chips, it is finally ready in good quantities. The Radeon X1950 Pro for example is such a product.
HiS Radeon X1650 PRO review
The Radeon X1650 Pro utilizes the ATI RV535 graphics core, a new revision of the RV530 which was the basis of the X1600 series. What's new then you are asking ? Uhm, well nothing except a newer 80nm fabrication process. That 80nm process ensures cheaper production of the silicon and more importantly less heat and likely lower graphics core voltages. That means you can clock the core faster, which was done quite insignificantly for this model but the increase is there.
Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB Review
So today we'll be looking at the rather lovely Radeon X1950 Pro from this company, a review on ATI's latest 12-pipe mid-range product which obviously was based off the R580 silicon, and quite frankly is a very credible graphics card as you'll learn in this article. The card features 36 Pixel Shaders units. For $199 you can pickup the 256MB version already, it sounds like a great deal as it should offer at least twice the performance of a X1600 Pro.