Date:
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon X850XT-PE Preview

The Radeon X850XT-PE, an extension of the current ATI technology, is unveiled. We take this enthusiast level video card and pair it up with the best of the best in six games to find out what kind of gaming experience you can expect.

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The Radeon X850XT-PE

For our preview today we have a reference sample of the Radeon X850XT-PE.

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The very first thing you will notice is the new thermal solution. ATI’s new flagship VPU cooler now takes up the width of two PCI slots. After suffering many marketing slides in relation to ATI only having single-slot card solutions, it seems a double slot cooling solution was required for the Radeon X850XT-PE. Certainly this does not carry the same negative stigma that it did in the days of the 5800, but we can discuss more about that later.

What is good about this system is that it keeps with the natural flow of air inside your case by pulling air in from the rear of the card, at the end where the power connector is, which is typically where you have front case fans pulling air in, and it blows the air out the back of the case. This is a typical airflow setup we find most enthusiasts to have. The X850XT-PE cooling solution will be exhausting its thermal load outside of the case, helping to keep it cool, instead of adding to an already hot enclosure. This also means it will not be pulling in the “dirty” air from the back of your case like the GeForceFX 5800Ultra did.

In operation we found that at POST the X850XT-PE’s fan spun up to full speed, which was very loud and could easily be heard over other noise. It only lasted briefly, however, during POST. Once the BIOS was finishing cycling through and Windows had booted, the fan spun down and was inaudible. It was still spinning though, as we could still feel it blowing air out the exhaust port. In fact, in all of our testing, even in overclocking, the fan never once spun up to the highest speed we witnessed at POST. During normal operation the fan was quiet and putting out hot air as it should, but this was done in an open air environment. We have to surmise that if our X850 had been in a very hot case that it would have been a bit louder at times. While we did not have time to cover this here, we are going to be revisiting this in our future X850 evaluations. Our overall opinion is that the new X850XT-PE cooler is not loud if used in a properly exhausted case.

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This is a PCI-Express video card which still requires external power to operate its signaling which can exceed the 75 watts delivered by the PCI-Express slot. However, the power cable is a testament to how power friendly this video card actually is. As you can see, this card does use the 6 pin PCI-Express power cable, but it only requires one Molex cable to be plugged in. This in comparison to a GeForce 6800Ultra PCI-Express video card, which requires two Molex cables to be plugged into the 6 pin PCI-Express power cable. The total wattage required by the card under a full load should fall short of 90 watts.

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This particular Radeon X850XT-PE does have two DVI ports and is using the Rage Theater chip for Video In capture. As you can see above, this is where the air exhausts out the back of the case.

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Comparing the size of the Radeon X850XT-PE to a PCI-Express GeForce 6800Ultra, we find that it is still shorter than a GeForce 6800Ultra. However, the fan is taller on the Radeon X850XT-PE.

Test Setup:

ABIT AA8 (Intel 925X), Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS2 5400C4Pro Dual Channel DDR2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

ATI Radeon X850XT-PE PCI-Express – Operating at default clock speeds 540MHz/1.18GHz using Catalyst 4.12 Beta.

Asus Radeon X800XT-PE PCI-Express – Operating at default clock speeds 520MHz/1.12GHz using Catalyst 4.12 Beta.

NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-Express – Overclocked to operate at default GeForce 6800Ultra speeds of 400MHz/1.10GHz using ForceWare 67.02.

We pit the X850XT-PE directly against a retail Asus X800XT-PE PCI-Express video card to see if the X850XT-PE can deliver a better gaming experience compared to ATI’s previous highest-end model. We also put in NVIDIA’s highest-end card, the PCI-Express GeForce 6800Ultra, to see how they compare. We did not have a working PCI-Express GeForce 6800Ultra on hand, so we took a PCI-Express GeForce 6800GT, which uses the same NV45 GPU and has the same 16 pixel-pipelines, and overclocked it to GeForce 6800Ultra speeds, so it fully represents a GeForce 6800Ultra. We are basically comparing the best of the best here and will find out who comes out on top for delivering the best gameplay in six games.

The only driver compatible with the Radeon X850XT-PE is a beta version of Catalyst 4.12 (8.08), so we used that driver on both ATI based video cards. For the GeForce 6800Ultra we used the publicly beta 67.02 driver. We used the default control panel settings on each video card. For ATI Catalyst drivers we left Catalyst A.I. on the default setting and for the ForceWare drivers we left the default settings, which means Trilinear Optimization was ON, Anisotropic mip filter optimization was OFF, and Anisotropic sample Optimization was ON.