![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, October 01, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Radeon 9800 XT Review
We examine the performance, image quality, and gaming experience delivered by ATI’s new Radeon 9800XT video card and explain their Half-Life 2 bundling plans.
The 9800XT:
Above is the retail ATI Radeon 9800XT. The first thing that will most likely catch your eye is the new thermal solution. The fan and heatsink unit is the largest we’ve seen yet on an ATI card. There is also a copper heatplate solution on the back of the 9800XT to increase surface area. Fear not though, this is not a "dustbuster". This is a low RPM / high volume fan solution that provide plenty of airflow across the heatsink fins. The lower RPM fan means less wind noise. In fact this fan is very quiet, and inside a case you would not be able to hear it at all over other fan noise. We do not see this cooling solution being an issue with any enthusiast when it comes to size or sound levels.
The heatsink is made of copper on the front and back. This does increase the overall weight of the card, but still is not as heavy as some competitor’s cards we have seen recently.
Our card is a Non Qualification Sample but does represent what you will buy retail, same core and memory speeds.
The overall length of the card is exactly the same as the 9800Pro, so no changes there. The width is also kept small compared to the competition. The size of the fan appears to be exactly 65 millimeters.
Test Setup:
ABIT IC7-G (i875P), Intel Pentium 4 3GHz “C” operating at 800MHz FSB, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LL TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.0b.
ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB - Operating at default clock speeds 412/730 using Catalyst Driver 3.7.
ATI Radeon 9800Pro 128MB – Operating at default clock speeds 380/680 using Catalyst Driver 3.7.
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256MB – Operating at default clock speeds 450/850 using Detonator 45.23 driver.
We strongly believe in only testing with officially released drivers and not beta level or other leaked drivers. Recent driver bugs and benchmarking issues are a very real concern to many of us. Therefore we chose to use the 45.23 NVIDIA drivers over the beta Detonator 50s that are available only to reviewers. To put it simply, we do not know what changes will be made to these non-released drivers by the time they make it to our readers in an official capacity.