ATI RADEON X800 XL

ATI RADEON X800 XL card

Back of the card

Essentially ATI’s RADEON X800 XL card is the “base” most of ATI’s board partners start around, and customize their own cards from there, so this wouldn’t be a very complete X800 XL roundup if we didn’t include ATI’s own RADEON X800 XL card; therefore we’ll start here first.

Quite frankly a number of enthusiasts prefer purchasing ATI’s retail cards (which are sold under the “Built By ATI” label), simply for return and warranty purposes. If something goes wrong, ATI tends to be pretty good at processing returns, with a solid 3-year warranty. ATI’s boards also tend to be priced competitively at the retail level, with Built By ATI boards often priced below some of the others included in this roundup.

There was a little bit of confusion initially concerning the X800 XL’s reference cooling design, as X800 XL board shots from the R480 launch (X850 XT PE) depicted a card with a small, box-shaped heatsink with a ducted fan design:

Original ATI X800 XL board shot provided by ATI

Only a few weeks later, ATI shipped reference boards to online reviewers for R430 previews with the same cooling unit that was borrowed from the X800 XT/X800 XT PE, complete with a copper heatsink/fan unit:

Rev2 X800 XL

It turns out that neither cooling unit made it into final production Built By ATI RADEON X800 XL boards, as our retail sample from ATI shipped with a large ducted aluminum cooler of a completely different design:

First X800 XL (top) and final retail board (bottom)

ATI cooler up close

ATI’s revised cooler is considerably larger than the original, nearly taking up the entire board. The heatsink is composed of aluminum and still relies on a ducted design, with the card’s fan providing a fresh supply of air for the card’s cooling system. Air passes within the duct, over the R430 chip and its memory, and finally, out the side of the X800 XL card. The fan is located offset of the graphics core, making the duct longer; this allows more air to be channeled across the heatsink and thus increases its cooling potential. In addition, this also has the added benefit of keeping heat from the VPU off the fan’s motor, improving fan longevity (heat and dust are the predominant causes of premature fan failure).

OVERDRIVE Support

One feature ATI touts with their newer CATALYST drivers is OVERDRIVE 3 (CAT 4.12) and OVERDRIVE 4 (CAT 5.2). OVERDRIVE 3 brought with it core and memory clock speed adjustment in 1MHz increments, in addition to the hardware monitoring capabilities and dynamic clock speed ranges older OVERDRIVE releases were known for. OVERDRIVE 4 took things one step further by providing 3D Test, which will test your overclocked settings.

Unfortunately, the only VPUs supported by OVERDRIVE 3 and 4 are the X850 XT/X850 XT PE. ATI has made a habit of only providing all the goodies for their very high-end cards, much to our disappointment. NVIDIA doesn’t skimp on their mainstream and value cards in this regard, providing the same overclocking functionality on all their products, regardless of the GPU, so we don’t understand why ATI continues to skimp consumers in this regard. Fortunately, the X800 XL’s clocks aren’t locked (as ATI did on the 9500 PRO), so you can use third-party utilities such as ATI Tool, PowerStrip, or Rage3D Tweak to overclock the board.

Software and accessories

As usual, ATI foregoes a traditional software bundle with their X800 XL card, opting instead to promote DOOM 3, Half-Life 2, and Matrix Online on the card’s packaging. Hardware accessories included in the box are composite and S-Video cables, a component video cable (intended for use with an HDTV), DVI adapter, the driver CD and accompanying manuals.