There are four models of X800 in this line of video cards, the Pro, XL, XT, and XT Platinum. Below is a table showing the core and memory clock rate for comparison. The top of the line XT Platinum has memory that runs 125MHz faster than the Pro and a core that is 45MHz faster. In terms of overclocking the 520MHz should be possible to obtain with the Pro but a 125MHz overclock would take some aftermarket cooling I would guess and possibly a voltage mod. Below the comparison table are the specifications for this video card.
| Product Name | X800 PRO | X800 XL | X800 XT | X800 XT PLATINUM EDITION |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) |
450
|
490
|
500
|
575
|
| Engine Clock Speed (MHz) |
475
|
400
|
500
|
520
|
- RADEON X800 Specifications
-
- 160 million transistors on 0.13 micron low-k fabrication process
- Up to sixteen extreme parallel pixel pipelines
- Six programmable vertex shader pipelines
- 256-bit quad-channel GDDR3 memory interface
- AGP 8X support or PCI Express support
- Memory Configuration:
-
- 256MB GDDR3 memory
- 256-bit memory interface
- Operating System Support:
-
- Windows® XP (Home or Pro)
- Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 1 (or later)
- Windows® Media Center Edition
- Warranty:
-
- 3-year limited
- Display Support:
-
- VGA connector for analog CRT
- DVI-I connector for digital CRT or flat panel
- S-video or composite connector for TV/VCR
- YPbPr connection to HDTV
- Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
- SMARTSHADER HD
-
- Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
- DirectX® 9.0 Vertex Shaders
- Vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
- Single cycle trigonometric operations (SIN & COS)
- DirectX® 9.0 Extended Pixel Shaders
- Up to 1,536 instructions and 16textures per rendering pass
- 2nd generation F-buffer technology accelerates multi-pass pixel shader programs with unlimited instructions
- 32 temporary and constant registers
- Facing register for two-sided lighting
- 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
- Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
- Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® via extensions
- SMOOTHVISION HD
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- 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
- Sparse multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sample patterns, and centroid sampling
- Lossless Color Compression (up to6:1)at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
- Temporal Anti-Aliasing
- 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
- Up to 128-tap texture filtering
- Adaptive algorithm with bilinear (performance) and trilinear (quality) options
- 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
- 3Dc
-
- High quality 4:1 Normal Map Compression
- Works with any two-channel data format
- HYPER Z HD
-
- 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with Early Z Test
- Lossless Z-Buffer Compression (up to 48:1)
- Fast Z-Buffer Clear
- Z Cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
- Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
- VIDEOSHADER HD
-
- Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
- FULLSTREAM video de-blocking technology for Real, DivX, and WMV9 formats
- VIDEOSOAP noise removal filtering for captured video
- MPEG1/2/4 decode and encode acceleration
- DXVA Support
- Hardware Motion Compensation, iDCT, DCT and color space conversion
- All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
- YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays†
- Adaptive Per-Pixel De-Interlacing and Frame Rate Conversion (temporal filtering)
- Dual integrated display controllers
- Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready)
- Integrated TV Output support up to 1024×768 resolution
- Windows® Logo Program compliant
- CATALYST™ Software Suite
The front of the box has a cool design of a minotaur with a large axe. The back displays a good deal of information and features for the card as well as a provocative picture of ATi’s new “digital superstar” they’ve named Ruby. It seems that ATi has decided to create their own female model to compete with NVIDIA’s pixie named Dawn and mermaid named Nalu.
The accessories included are Composite and S-video cables, HDTV out cable, DVI to VGA Adapter, and Power cable connector (not pictured). There are no games bundled with this video card only the driver CD and manual. To be honest, this is a little disappointing in my opinion. This isn’t a cheap video card so some games would be nice.
This card like most of ATi’s has a bright red PCB and uses a hefty copper heatsink to cool the 0.13 micron R420 GPU. The heatsink also passes air over the memory on the way out to give it some extra cooling. This X800 Pro utilizes 12 pipes while the XT version of the X800 takes advantage of all 16. People have successfully modded their X800 to unlock the extra pipes but this will not be discussed further in this review.
There is a DVI, VGA, and HDTV & TV-out (Mini Din 10pin S-Video) connector which means you will be able to use this video card with a CRT, LCD, TV, HDTV, and just about anything you can think of. Because this video card requires more voltage than the AGP slot is able to dole out you will need to plug a 4-pin molex from your power supply into the purple connection on the card. Adjacent to the purple connector is a yellow connector which is an analog video-in connector. This is so you can run a cable from the video card to an analog video capture port on the front of your case if you have one.
This card has 128MB of memory and uses Samsung K4J55323QF-GC16 256-bit GDDR3 chips. The memory is rated for 600MHz (1200MHz DDR) operation which is 150MHz faster than the card is clocked at. This 150MHz should help you easily overclock the memory to 600MHz and hopefully a little faster. Also on the back of the card is an ATi Rage Theater chip. This chip will take care of your VIVO functionality with the card.
I will be benchmarking with Half-Life 2, FarCry 1.3, Unreal Tournament 2004, 3DMark03, and 3DMark05. The following is a listing of the demos that were used for each game benchmark. Half-Life 2: Hardware OC Coast, Unreal Tournament 2004: dm-rankin, as-convoy, br-colossus (averaged together), FarCry 1.3: BenchemallDefaultDemo. The first set of benchmarks will use no anti aliasing and no anisotropic filtering and the second will use 4x anti aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering. For the remainder of the review anti aliasing will be referred to as AA and anisotropic filtering will be referred to as AF.
Test Bed:
- Gigabyte K8NS Pro
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+
- Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL
- Vantec Stealth 470w PSU
- Plextor PX-708A
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive
- Windows XP SP2, DirectX 9c, Catalyst 4.12 drivers
At 1024×768 the X800 Pro and 6600GT are very close in terms of FPS, however as the resolution is increased the X800 Pro pulls away. At 1280×1024 there is a significant difference between the X800 Pro and 6600GT. With the resolution at 1600×1200 the X800 Pro is still running strong at 63.6 FPS. The 6600GT and 5700 Ultra drop to 26 and 11.5 respectively, both would be unplayable by any standard.
Benchmarking with FarCry produced similar results to that of Half-Life 2, however the differences were not as staggering. For the most part the 6600GT was able to keep up, with the exception of 1600×1200. Again, the 5700 Ultra, proves to be outdated and is far behind both other cards with each resolution.
With Unreal Tournament 2004 all of the video cards did very well. The X800 Pro edges out the 6600GT at 1024×768 then dominates at 1280×1024 and 1600×1200. With the frame rate as high as it is, there will be no noticeable difference between them. However the higher the better because you will be able to add some AA and AF into the mix and still have a decent frame rate.
3DMark03 is a synthetic benchmark made by Futuremark as you probably already know. This benchmark runs a series of simulated game tests and gives you a score based on the performance. This X800 Pro was almost able to break 10,000 3DMarks and could easily do that with some tweaking and overclocking. The 5700 and 6600GT do not fare as well and this trend is evident with each resolution.
3DMark05 is the successor to 3DMark03 and throws much more at your video card than 3DMark03 does. All of these cards were able to successfully complete the benchmark but the scores are what matters. This X800 Pro worked the other two cards with all three resolutions. Although this is a synthetic benchmark and does not directly relate to how the video card is going to perform in real life gaming it does give a good comparison between cards.
Although this card is capable of running 6x AA and 16x AF the other cards were not. Because of this I set all the cards to 4x AA and 8x AF so the settings would be even. I then re-ran the same benchmarks that were run with AA and AF disabled.
With Half-Life 2 the FPS were very close between this ATi Radeon X800 Pro and the Chaintech GeForce 6600GT. However, the X800 Pro did a little better than the 6600GT with all the resolutions. The AA and AF could easily be increased with this X800 Pro without taking a performance hit and improving the image quality significantly. As for the GeForce 5700 Ultra, well I think the numbers speak for themselves…
FarCry testing did not turn out like the Half-Life 2 testing. There is a larger margin between the X800 Pro and 6600GT cards, and with all three resolutions the X800 Pro came out on top. At 1600×1200 the X800 Pro is just about at the point where it would become un-enjoyable to play. I would suggest running it at 1280×1024 to make sure the FPS didn’t drop too low during a heavy scene. Again we see that the 5700 Ultra does suffer because of the level of AA and AF.
The benchmarking results for Unreal Tournament 2004 were very similar to FarCry. The X800 Pro did very well, as the resolution increased the other two cards fell behind. As I mentioned with the previous benchmarking because this X800 Pro is so powerful the added AA and AF does not affect the frame rate much. The AA and AF could both be increased for better image quality without sacrificing overall performance.
3DMark03 is a synthetic benchmark so I can’t say much for how it relates to real world gaming. However we can see that the X800 Pro is more than capable of holding it’s own even with the AA and AF increased. Compared to the other two video cards there is a significant difference in score with all three resolutions.
Like I mentioned before 3DMark05 requires a lot from a video card and this X800 was able to muster up that power. At 1024×768 all of the video cards were able to complete the benchmark, but with somewhat unimpressive scores, with the exception of the X800 Pro. At 1280×1024 the 6600GT failed while the 5700 Ultra and X800 Pro were able to finish it off. At 1600×1200 the benchmark would crash with the 6600GT and 5700 with the following error; “IDirect3DDevice9::CreateTexture failed: Out of video memory (D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY).” Because this X800 Pro has 256MB of memory it was able to complete the benchmark with a score higher than the 6600GT at 1024×768.
Pros:
- Excellent FPS across the board
- Great image quality
- Good overclock with the core
- All necessary accessories included
- 8x AGP
Cons
- Memory overclocking lacking
- No game bundle