Introduction

The PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO card

PowerColor X1800 GTO and ATI reference X1600 XT board

Although ATI’s had no problem competing closely with NVIDIA on the high-end of the 3D graphics market for the past six months, for whatever reason they haven’t had as much success capturing sales in the mainstream segment of the market over the same time period. In fact, some might argue that ATI’s mainstream lineup hasn’t been all that exciting since the Radeon 9500/9600 era a few years ago. Looking back over ATI’s last few mainstream releases, a case can certainly be made in favor of this argument for the most part. Let’s take a quick look down memory lane shall we?

After the Radeon 9500 Pro and 9600 XT fairly cemented ATI at the top of the mainstream segment (keep in mind that sales of the 9600 Pro GPU were also helped along by repeated 5600 Ultra delays by NVIDIA), ATI followed these cards up with their first shader model 2.0b mainstream card offering, the RV410-based Radeon X700. The X700 got off to an awfully embarrassing start for ATI, with the high-end card offering in the X700 family, the X700 XT never making its way to market en masse, despite the fact that ATI repeatedly assured the public that it would. This left the slower X700 Pro to fend off both NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6600. Ultimately this was too tall a task for the Radeon X700 Pro, try as they might ATI and their board partners never matched the success they’d enjoyed previously with the 9500/9600 series: even when they tried to entice the market by selling their 256MB X700 Pro card at prices comparable to or even lower than the 128MB GeForce 6600 GT the market just didn’t bite on the card. A quick look at Valve’s latest Steam survey points this out most dramatically – the GeForce 6600 line outpaces the X700 by a factor of nearly five.

Now in the X700’s defense, the GeForce 6600 was an extremely strong part. On the high-end, the 6600 GT delivered performance slightly greater than the high-end DX9 cards of the previous generation, including ATI’s excellent 9800 XT, while also boasting Shader Model 3.0 compliance and NVIDIA’s SLI technology. The vanilla GeForce 6600 shared all the key features found in the 6600 GT, only with lower clock speeds. In fact, the 6600 family was so successful that NVIDIA has gone on to sell over a million of these GPUs and never truly replaced them until the debut of the GeForce 7600 family just last month. Not since the GeForce4 Ti 4200 had one GPU dominated the mainstream market so well for so long.

PowerColor X1800 GTO meets PowerColor X800 XL

The X1800 GTO and X1800 XT board design share many traits

In the summer of 2004, about a year after the 6600’s debut, ATI finally concocted a mainstream GPU to give the GeForce 6600 family some competition – the Radeon X800 GT and X800 GTO. While these cards were technically mainstream parts with price points in the sub-$200 range, they were actually based on higher-end R420/R430 and in some cases R480 GPUs that were normally used in $300+ Radeon X800 XL, X800 XT, and X850 cards and instead placed in roughly $150 X800 GTs and ~$180-$200 X800 GTOs.

Because they didn’t want to compromise on the margin of their retail graphics cards, ATI didn’t provide parts based these X800 GT/X800 GTO cards themselves, instead they relied on their board partners to take on the challenge. And take on the challenge they did, both the X800 GT and X800 GTO delivered better performance than the equivalent mainstream offerings from NVIDIA, but the market was a little confused by the plethora of options available: some board partners used the GT/GTO brand to sell hobbled cards, in some cases selling GT boards with a 128-bit memory interface when most users expected a 256-bit card.

PowerColor X1800 GTO and GeForce 7600 GT reference board

PowerColor X1800 GTO (top) and the ATI X1800 GTO reference board

In the X800 GT/GTO’s defense though, when properly configured they were awfully strong parts, as they were essentially based on higher-end DX9 GPUs. Those “in-the-know” so to speak quickly picked these cards up, as they delivered a good deal more performance than equivalently priced cards from NVIDIA.

With the X800 GT/GTO delivering such strong performance, many expected ATI’s follow-up mainstream card offering, the Radeon X1600 family, to deliver performance that was equal to, if not better than the X800 GT and GTO, however this didn’t turn out to be the case. Unlike the high-end origins of the X800 GT/GTO, which were literally based off the same GPU as the X800/X850 XT line, the X1600’s RV530 GPU was built from the ground up to be cheaper to produce, and hence didn’t have the high-end features found in the more expensive Radeon cards such as a 256-bit memory interface. As a result, sales of the cards were sluggish – some enthusiasts actually picked up X800 GTOs instead of the X1600 XT – others got newer mainstream cards from NVIDIA such as the GeForce 6800 GS, which delivered 6800 GT-like performance at a lower price point. To make a long story short, the X1600 was beginning to look like another repeat of the X700 for ATI, they were forced to drop prices on the X1600 in order to remain competitive with NVIDIA: in a matter of months the X1600 XT’s price went from an MSRP of $249 to $200, then $180, nowadays X1600 XT cards can be found for $150 or less! A new mainstream card offering was needed to stop the bleeding, and ATI needed it ASAP.

ATI’s solution? The Radeon X1800 GTO!