RADEON X1800 XT/X1800 XL boards

High-end Card Comparison
Card	Memory Interface	Memory Clock Speed (MHz)	Core Clock Speed	Pixel Shader Pipelines	Vertex Shading Units	Peak Texel Fill Rate	Peak Memory Bandwidth	Official MSRP
RADEON X1800 XT	256-bit GDDR3	750MHz	625MHz	16	8	10000 Mtexels/sec	48GB/sec	$549
RADEON X1800 XL	256-bit GDDR3	500MHz	500MHz	16	8	8000 Mtexels/sec	32GB/sec	$449
GeForce 7800 GTX	256-bit GDDR3	600MHz	430MHz	24	8	10320 Mtexels/sec	38.4GB/sec	$599
GeForce 7800 GT	256-bit GDDR3	500MHz	400MHz	20	7	8000 Mtexels/sec	32GB/sec	$449

Looking over the specs, the memory subsystem of ATI’s RADEON X1800 XT card is certainly impressive: ATI’s delivering considerably more bandwidth than anything else on the market, although the fill-rate between it and the GeForce 7800 GTX are pretty close, with the 7800 GTX boasting a slight advantage. The X1800 XT and the GeForce 7800 GT are pretty evenly matched on paper in terms of raw performance metrics, although of course finding a stock GeForce 7800 GT board that runs at NVIDIA’s default frequencies may prove a little difficult – practically every manufacturer is overclocking their boards now.

On paper ATI’s pricing is competitive with NVIDIA’s but the reality is that the GeForce 7800 GTX can be easily found for under $500 while the GeForce 7800 GT listings on Price Watch hover as low as $351. Based on this, we’re inclined to give the price advantage to NVIDIA. We should also mention that ATI’s producing a 256MB RADEON X1800 XT SKU priced at $499 with the same clocks (625MHz core/750MHz memory). The board we’re reviewing today ships with 512MB of memory and is therefore priced a little higher at $549.

As you can see in the pictures, ATI’s new flagship board, the RADEON X1800 XT, is one daunting looking card. You’ve got dual-slot cooling, just like the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, in fact ATI borrows the exact same fan that was used on the X850 XT PE once again for their RADEON X1800 XT.


Like the RADEON X850 XT, the fan operates dynamically, with the RPMs ranging from mild to wild based on temperature. Fortunately during our testing with the card, the only time we ever saw the wild fan setting was when we were booting up the system.



Once again ATI uses a ducted cooling system, with the RADEON X1800 XT’s fan sucking in the air within your PC, passing it across the VPU and its memory before it finally exits outside of your system’s case. ATI uses a combination of copper and aluminum to cool the graphics core and memory modules, while a bank of VRM circuitry is cooled with a second aluminum heatsink.

ATI continues to provide OVERDRIVE support solely for their XT cards such as the RADEON X1800 XT.


ATI’s RADEON X1800 XL board is a single-slot design with an all-new copper/aluminum heatsink combo that looks rather unassuming, but actually generates quite a bit of noise. It also has a fan that dynamically adjusts RPMs based on temperature only its fan spins at higher RPMs, resulting in more noise when it does crank up, a trait which unfortunately occurred frequently, even while at the Windows desktop. We’d really like to see ATI integrate a quieter fan on future X1800 XL boards.

CrossFire

So far ATI’s been pretty mum on CrossFire details for RADEON X1800. All they’ve acknowledged is that they’ve implemented a new compositing engine chip which supports resolutions of 2048x1536 @70Hz+ for the X1800 and X1600, while the RADEON X1300 will use the PCI Express bus to link the two cards together. ATI expects to deliver more news on the CrossFire topic sometime next month.