Connect3D Radeon X800XL Grange-over-Sands

Cruel and unusual punishments might be forbidden by the US Constitution, but that doesn't prevent the judiciary coming up with 'interesting' sentences. Miami judge Jeffrey Swartz offered a man arrested for playing 50 Cent too loud a choice: a fine, or listening to Verdi's opera 'La Traviata'. 'You impose your music on me, and I'm going to impose my music on you,' said the playa-hating judge.

You can only imagine what choice ATi would have been offered by him. 'Make some new AGP graphics cards or spend the next two hours listening to Nvidia's SoundStorm Song!' If you want to rock with Nvidia, check out www.nvidia.com; ATi, however, has taken the other path.

Nvidia's songs might not rock, but the GeForce 6800 GT certainly does, and it made the Radeon X800 Pro look distinctly second-best. The X800XL, a 16-pipeline GPU with 256MB of GDDR3 memory is ATi's response, and it's available in both PCI-E and AGP flavas. It's also £50 cheaper than the majority of GeForce 6800 GTs.

Connect 3D has stuck with the reference design for its AGP Radeon X800XL, so the card is cooled by a flat-bladed fan and metal heatsink that covers two-thirds of the PCB. ATi has a tradition of designing quiet coolers for its GPUs, but this is one tradition that the Radeon X800XL HSF abandons. The fan isn't hideously noisy, but it's certainly noticeable, making a high-pitched whirring that would probably earn it a good hour of Puccini's 'Turandot' from Judge Swartz.

The Radeon X800XL is a native PCI-E chip so it requires a bridge chip to work on AGP. This sits on the back of the card, so it's not cooled by the HSF and gets very hot, though this doesn't appear to affect performance.

The GPU runs at the reference speed of 400MHz, with the memory at 490MHz (980MHz effective). It raced through our Far Cry benchmark at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF at an average 43.5fps - quicker than the GeForce 6800 GT, which managed 39fps. In Half-Life 2, at the same high settings, the two cards reversed positions, with the GeForce 6800 GT averaging 45.1fps compared to the Radeon X800XL's 42.4fps. The Radeon X800XL doesn't emerge as the clear victor, but it's still very fast at high resolutions with anti-aliasing.

We replaced our Doom 3 benchmark with The Chronicles of Riddick because it poses an even tougher test. Rendering Vin Diesel's bald head is harder than you might think, especially when it's surrounded by the gunfire-filled Butcher Bay prison. At 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 8x AF, our reference GeForce 6800 GT scored a reasonable 34.3fps. This is an average so it seems that even the mighty 6800 GT won't always provide a smooth frame rate at these high settings.

The Radeon X800XL fared significantly worse in Riddick, though, being brought down to a lowly 21fps. You have to drop to 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF to get over 40fps. Riddick uses a lot of advanced shaders, and, like a criminal record coming back to haunt it, the X800XL's roots in Radeon 9800 technology do it no favours.

The Radeon X800XL overclocked better than the PCI-E version, with the core handling 450MHz and the memory 585MHz (1.17GHz effective), which is practically the legal limit for GDDR3. At these speeds, it almost hit 50fps at the highest settings in Far Cry.



CONCLUSION

The successor to the Radeon X800 GPU, codenamed R520, will probably see the light of day later in the summer, so it may be that the Radeon X800XL represents the final version of the X800. It's a good way to go out, though. Riddick might put a slight cloud over its future, but considering how much performance it offers for just over £230, the Radeon X800XL is an absolute steal.

Author: Alex Watson

Connect3D Radeon X800XL