ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256 MB

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
ATI
Sep. 8, 2004

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The Card

The graphics and artwork on the ATI Radeon X800 Pro box doesn't deviate much from the previous generation of Radeon cards. ATI has done a good job with the red-on-black style and weird silver 3D beasts in the past. While I was never too fond of any of the silver beasts, the overall package is very appealing and is very easy to recognize. Personally, I think Ruby would have done a much better job on the front of the box. That Minotaur guy is too weird for my liking. Sadly, there is no "Half-Life 2 Voucher" sticker on the box. While unfortunate, it isn't too shocking.

Much like the continued box artwork, the card itself continues ATI's trend of a red PCB and thin copper heatsink. Just like the 9800 XT, the plastic cover over the heatsink has a graphical sticker with a clip of the box art. With the move to DDR3, the memory chips don't require any extra cooling on the X800 Pro. This allows for a smaller heatsink which is dedicated to cooling the core. The reverse side of the card lacks any sort of heat-spreader for the memory and only has a small clip to hold the heatsink onto the core. ATI has always done a good job of keeping power and heat requirements down. Even the X800 XT PE has a single-slot cooling solution. NVIDIA, on the other hand, has had a problem with slapping on giant coolers that take up the adjacent PCI slot.

The fan on the X800 Pro is much like the fan that was on the 9800 XT. The self-adjusting fan is fairly quiet and probably won't be heard in most systems. However, if you have an extremely quiet computer, you may be able to hear the X800 Pro fan when running Direct X or OpenGL programs.

The connections on the X800 Pro are nothing special. There is the usual VGA, DVI and TV out as well as a single internal Molex power connector.

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Page 2 of 13

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card
Page 3: The Card (cont.) / The Bundle
Page 4: Test Setup
Page 5: Benchmarks: Doom 3
Page 6: Benchmarks: Half-Life 2
Page 7: Benchmarks: Far Cry
Page 8: Benchmarks: Need for Speed Underground
Page 9: Benchmarks: Splinter Cell
Page 10: Benchmarks: Call of Duty
Page 11: Image Quality
Page 12: Overclocking
Page 13: Conclusion

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4 User Comments

1 - Posted by Rich on September 9, 2004 - 8:45 am

I am curious why you chose not to install SP2 for the testing. Any idea if there is a performance difference between SP1a and SP2 for XP?

2 - Posted by Brian on September 9, 2004 - 11:16 am

Testing of the cards began prior to the release of SP2. After the upcoming review of the XFX 6800 GT, the test system will have SP2 installed.

3 - Posted by Rich on September 10, 2004 - 8:42 am

Makes sense, I would be a bit interested to find out if there are any performance differences between SP1a and SP2.

4 - Posted by Brian on September 10, 2004 - 8:49 am

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-237-1.h...

SP1 and SP2 seem to constantly switch places in different performance tests. Overall SP2 is slightly faster but definitely not noticeable unless you are comparing bench #s.

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