PowerColor X800 XL

PowerColor X800 XL card

Back of the card

While PowerColor used to play it pretty conservatively with their board designs, sticking closely to ATI’s reference specifications, more recently they’ve taken steps to appeal to enthusiasts. For instance, their Bravo Edition RADEON 9600 XT card shipped with faster memory modules and was overclocked from the factory.

Following in the 9600 XT Bravo’s footsteps is PowerColor’s RADEON X800 Bravo Edition. This X800 board ships with 1.6ns GDDR3 memory modules from Samsung, good for speeds up to 600MHz, and are the same modules used on last year’s high-end, but elusive X800 XT Platinum Edition. (In comparison, none of the X800 XL boards we’re evaluating today ship with 1.6ns modules, opting instead for slower 2.0ns memory, including PowerColor’s own RADEON X800 XL card.) PowerColor also outfitted their X800 Bravo board with dual DVI connections, a component video cable, and VIVO. Even now, over two months later, never before have so many features been integrated onto an X800 card.

Released shortly before the X800 Bravo, PowerColor’s X800 XL card also drew our attention earlier this year, earning a 91% score and our Bull’s Eye Award in our review back in January. In hindsight, we probably should have waited for today’s roundup before handing out awards, but at the time the only other X800 XL boards on the market were merely reference designs.

Since the review was posted, PowerColor’s card has basically remained unchanged (with the exception of one minor detail which we’ll discuss shortly), although we’ll go over the card’s highlights in case you missed our original review.

Dual DVI here

Large ATI reference cooling

External power required

PowerColor relies on the same revised cooler ATI uses for their X800 XL card. This larger cooler does a good job of keeping the graphics core and its memory cool, and is composed of aluminum. In our original review of the PowerColor X800 XL, the card’s fan ran at the same (high) speed at all times. Normally the fan is supposed to run dynamically, with the RPMs varying based on temperature. In operation with the ATI reference card we’ve found that the fan never hit the high RPM setting, running at the moderate setting even when the board is overclocked, therefore the PowerColor card generated considerably more noise than the reference ATI RADEON X800 XL card.

Fortunately, PowerColor was able to fix this problem with a BIOS update. All Powercolor X800 XL boards ship with this revised BIOS.

The rest of the board’s hardware is definitely non-reference. First, PowerColor includes Silicon Image’s Sil 1162 DVI transmitter for powering the board’s second DVI output. This is the same transmitter used by ASUS and MSI on their X800 XL boards. The second addition is ATI’s RAGE THEATER chip, which is located on the bottom of the board, providing VIVO capability.

One trait that separates the PowerColor X800 XL from the others is its external power connector. It’s the only X800 XL card we’ve seen to ship with this and it’s required for operation.

Software bundled with the PowerColor RADEON X800 XL includes a copy of Hitman: Contracts, PowerDVD 5.0, PowerProducer 2.0 Gold DVD, PowerDirector 3.0 SE, Power2Go 3.0, and Media Show 2.0 SE. Hardware accessories provided include two DVI adapters, component and composite video cables, a power cable, S-Video cable, and finally, a VIVO cable.