Date:
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon X800XL Preview

We evaluate the $300 ATI Radeon X800XL video card finding what kind of gaming experience it will provide for you on a PCI-Express platform. We compare it to the X800Pro, 6800OC, and 6800GT.

Introduction:

We covered the introduction of the ATI Radeon X800XL in our ATI Radeon X850XT-PE Preview two weeks ago. The Radeon X800XL is among two new products that were announced that are expanding the Radeon X800 series of video cards. These two new video cards, the Radeon X800 and the Radeon X800XL are simply an extension of ATI’s current X800 series technology. They contain all the same 2D and 3D features as the Radeon X800Pro, XT and XT-PE, such as Pixel Shader 2.0b, Vertex Shader 2.0, 6 vertex units, SMARTSHADER HD, 3Dc, SMOOTHVISON HD and HyperZ HD.

The idea behind these new video cards is to produce something fast for the PCI-Express platform with reduced costs. The X800Pro, X800XT and X800XT-PE are all based on the 130nm Low-K manufacturing process. However, the new X800 and X800XL use a new 110nm manufacturing process. There are two main advantages for ATI’s X800 series at 110nm. Primarily, it gives ATI approximately a 40% wafer savings over the 130nm process, resulting in a much less expensive core logic. Secondly, it allows a very large power and heat savings as can be seen in the fewer power cables needed by the card and the lack of a huge cooling system.

The Radeon X800 and Radeon X800XL are both PCI-Express parts. The Radeon X800XL is positioned comparatively to the X800Pro AGP with a small performance increase. The Radeon X800XL is using 16 fully functioning pixel-pipelines, whereas the X800Pro AGP uses 12 pixel-pipelines. The VPU core and memory speeds have been set accordingly on the Radeon X800XL to meet the price/performance ratio of the market it is targeted for at $299. The VPU core is set at 400MHz and the memory at 1GHz.

When we compare the raw fillrate and memory bandwidth between the X800Pro AGP and the X800XL PCI-E this is what we find. The X800Pro AGP has 12 pipes at 475MHz which gives us 5.7 gigapixels per second; the X800XL PCI-E has 16 pipes at 400MHz which gives us 6.4 gigapixels per second. When we compare memory bandwidth we find that the X800Pro AGP has 256MB of GDDR3 at 900MHz which gives us 28.8GB/sec, the X800XL PCI-E has 256MB of GDDR3 at 1GHz which gives us 32GB/sec. Right off the bat we see that the PCI-Express X800XL is theoretically faster for both fillrate and memory bandwidth.

At the time of writing this, the direct competition for the Radeon X800XL is the PCI-Express GeForce 6800GT from NVIDIA. The GeForce 6800GT is also a 16 pixel-pipeline video card, operating at 350MHz which is 5.6 gigapixels per second of fillrate, slightly less than the Radeon X800XL. As for the memory bandwidth the GeForce 6800GT uses 256MB of GDDR3 at 1GHz which matches the Radeon X800XL for memory bandwidth. As of today, due to pricing changes by ATI that were communicated to us less than 24 hours ago, the directly comparable video card would be the GeForce 6800 series, better known as the “Vanilla 6800.” It has only 12 pixel pipelines and a bit slower memory than the 6800GT.

So how does the price stack up? When ATI announced the Radeon X800XL two weeks ago they had an MSRP set at $349. Now that they have gone “into full production,” they were able to lower the price even more and the final MSRP of the Radeon X800XL is now only $299 as of yesterday. When the ATI Radeon X800Pro AGP debuted it had an MSRP of $399. So here we have the Radeon X800XL at a hundred dollars less than a Radeon X800Pro with a faster fillrate and memory bandwidth.

The Radeon X800XL:

For our preview today we have a reference sample of the Radeon X800XL.

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The Radeon X800XL is a single-slot video card utilizing a familiar copper heatsink and fan that we’ve seen on all X800 series video cards. The RAM does not require any special cooling on this video card. This card is the same size as an X800Pro, X800XT/PE. As you can see this is indeed a PCI-Express video card.

What is most noticeable is that this card does not require any external power connections at all. It completely operates off of the PCI-Express bus for power. Compare this to the one Molex power connector the AGP X800Pro needs, or the 6-plug PCI-Express power connector a GeForce 6800GT PCI-E requires. Keep in mind that the PCI-Express slot is capable of delivering 75 watts of power on its own, far outpacing what could be provided by an AGP slot.

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The label on the video card indicates that ATI is calling the Asic on the X800XL the R430, (R420 is X800Pro, X800XT/PE). The RAM modules being used are Samsung GDDR3 chips rated at 2ns for a clock speed of 500MHz, which is what the default memory speeds are on the Radeon X800XL. The Radeon X800XL comes with a DVI connection, VGA connection and TV-Out.