Introduction

In 2004 both ATI and NVIDIA doubled the number of pixel pipelines in their high-end offerings from eight pixel pipelines (in the case of ATI) to sixteen. As you can imagine, this change, along with other innovations such as newer shader types and high-speed GDDR3 memory, had a profound impact on performance. High-end offerings from both companies delivered nearly 2.5 times the performance of their predecessors in some cases. The timing of these cards arrival couldn’t have been any better either, as next-generation titles such as Half-Life 2 and id’s scary shooter DOOM 3, needed all the horsepower they could get for optimal performance at high resolutions.

ATI X800 XL reference board, PowerColor XL board, and 6800 GT

PowerColor RADEON X800 XL board poses with ATI X850 XT PE reference board

These high-end cards came with one caveat however: price. ATI’s 16-pipeline RADEON X800 XT AGP was late to arrive in AGP form, and often sold for over $500 at retail outlets, while the least expensive 16-pipeline NVIDIA offering was the GeForce 6800 GT. The GeForce 6800 GT was, and still is an excellent card, but with a retail price tag of $400, hardly a “value” solution.

Despite this, the GeForce 6800 GT and its little brother, the 12-pipeline GeForce 6800 were able to capture a significant portion of the high-end graphics card segment. Both cards offered best-in-class price/performance ratios and were readily available on the retail market, which is always important for racking up sales. With the exception of the RADEON X800 PRO, ATI’s equivalent offerings were nowhere to be found at retail for the most part, with supply of most cards going to OEMs such as Dell.

PowerColor RADEON X800 XL (bottom) and reference ATI X800 XL board from ATI (top)

XL boards taking on the 6800 GT

Complicating matters was the massive hole ATI left in their product lineup. For most of 2004 ATI had no equivalent to the GeForce 6800 at the $300 price point. The RADEON X800 SE stealthily arrived late to market, and never hit retail in significant quantities, while the 12-pipeline RADEON X800 PRO had a tough time holding the line against GeForce 6800 GT, which was priced similarly but featured a 16-pipeline architecture. Making matters worse, NVIDIA introduced additional GeForce 6800 SKUs over the summer for the OEM market: the GeForce 6800 GTO and GeForce 6800 LE, while enterprising NVIDIA board partner ASUS offered lower priced GeForce 6800 GT offerings with only 128MB of memory.

The bottom line is that ATI needed an answer, and they needed one quickly.

Both cards feature single-slot cooling

Similar board designs but there are differences. Note external power on PowerColor board

Their answer? The RADEON X800 XL. The RADEON X800 XL takes advantage of TSMC’s smaller 0.11-micron manufacturing process, allowing ATI to cram all the features present in high-end RADEON X800 XT/X800 XT Platinum Edition into a smaller core, including their 16 pixel pipes. The real kicker though is X800 XL’s MSRP: $300. This is $100 less than GeForce 6800 GT!

Up for review today is the first retail RADEON X800 XL card we’ve received, PowerColor’s RADEON X800 XL. PowerColor has incorporated their own unique cooling solution for their RADEON X800 XL card, as well as VIVO. Let’s see what other tricks PowerColor has up their sleeve for this card.