ATI Radeon X1000 Series Preview

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Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Kurtis Kronk
Brian
ATI
Oct. 5, 2005

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Introduction

Recently I got a chance to hang out with the good guys and gals from ATI along with some of my fellow editors just outside of San Francisco at the beautiful Claremont Resort. The interesting thing is that I was completely taken by surprise when I was invited to attend this year's "Tech Day" event - mainly because I wasn't invited until less than a week before it was to be held. Yet another surprise - they shipped me a motherboard and a pair of X850s unannounced for Crossfire testing just a few days before I was to fly out.

Because of the unannounced Crossfire package I was foolishly under the assumption that the majority of what ATI would be telling us would be Crossfire-related. Of course, I had to assume that they would tell us something about the long-awaited answer to NVIDIA's G70 (7800GTX), R520, but for some reason I didn't expect much.

This doesn't happen often, but it turns out I was wrong. Quite wrong in fact - and I couldn't be happier about it. Not only did ATI spend little time discussing Crossfire, but they also "announced" R520 and talked about it in great depth. ATI also unveiled the entire next-gen family of boards, dubbed the X1000 series. As one would expect, there will be three price-points: low-end, mid-range and high-end. Oh, and did I mention that they gave me four boards to clutter my suitcase for the return trip? Yup, life is rough. The boards received include the X1800 XT, X1800 XL, X1600 XT and X1300 Pro. See the next page for details on each of the different variants including some of the members of the family we aren't looking at today.

Obviously, I wanted to conduct a full review of all four of these video cards, but I had a little bit of a problem. Since I wrote the XFX 7800 GT Preview about a month ago, I've been planning on getting an AMD FX-55 to replace my 3500+ with. The reason I'm replacing the CPU is that I was starting to see in my testing results that I had a CPU bottleneck. I was expecting to get the FX-55 on September 29th, giving me about six days to test all my cards, but UPS had to re-route the package for some reason and it was re-scheduled for delivery on October 3rd, giving me less than two full days to benchmark all the cards. So, I was pretty much left with only once choice: do a preview of the X1000 series with the 3500+, and then do the full reviews with the FX-55.

In addition to the usual benchmarks, I'll also have more information than usual about the architecture and features, and you'll also see some information from the Question and Answer Session during the Tech Days event. Within the next week I will post some miscellaneous Tech Days event coverage, including some movies of exciting technology and game demos, lots of pictures, and all of the slides we were shown - so keep your eyes peeled for that. With that said, I would like to mention that you can expect more information and testing to be conducted than we have done in the past with our video card reviews, so it might take me a couple of weeks to get all the testing done for the full reviews. The reason for this is that we periodically (or randomly and obsessively, to be more precise) modify the way we conduct our reviews in order to improve the quality of our work. For example, our image quality will be tested more thoroughly and we will also be conducting many more benchmarks, across more applications and configurations, than ever before.

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Page 1 of 11

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Re-Introducing R520 / Availability
Page 3: Architecture & New Features
Page 4: Question & Answer Session
Page 5: The Cards
Page 6: Test Setup
Page 7: Benchmarks - Half-Life 2
Page 8: Benchmarks - Day of Defeat: Source
Page 9: Benchmarks - Doom 3
Page 10: Benchmarks - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Page 11: Image Quality / Closing Thoughts

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8 User Comments

1 - Posted by Frosty on October 5, 2005 - 5:37 pm

i am gonan keep my 7800gtx thank you very much, i really dont feel the need to upgrade now......

2 - Posted by sean478 on October 5, 2005 - 7:37 pm

Hi :) thanks for the review dude :)

I was wandering if you could email me the bioses for these cards?

i was planing on makeing flash mod guides for them :)

for example x1300np to x1300 pro mod and x1800xl to x1800xt mod ect. :)

my email is rswisfamly@cox.net :)

getting the bioses:

try using a bootable dos disk with flashrom.exe on it
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/flashrom240.z...
also try ati flash
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/atiflash309.z...

command to enter: atiflash -s 0 .bin

you could also try dumping the bios from ati tool (try the latest beta)

http://www.techpowerup.com

ati tool/settings/misc./dump bios

btw do you have access to the demos for the x1800s? do you think i could get ahold of them? :)

Edit: you could also try winflash for ati :)
http://www.techpowerup.com/bios/bios/winflash105.z...

3 - Posted by Dyrewolph on October 5, 2005 - 9:27 pm

Haha... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahahah... oooo that's a good one Kurtis! almost made me wet myself!

4 - Posted by Kurtis on October 5, 2005 - 10:29 pm

hehehe... glad someone catches my little funnies. :-D

of course, it's true... but it sounds funny! ;-)

5 - Posted by Frosty on October 13, 2005 - 7:27 am

it amazes me that with just 16 pipelines they are able to beat the 7800gtx...

6 - Posted by handrail on October 13, 2005 - 10:52 pm

the x1800xt does have a higher mem and clock speed though. maybe they can just muscle their way through to higher performance?

7 - Posted by Brian on October 13, 2005 - 10:54 pm

This is a good read:

http://www.thetechlounge.com/news.php?id=7669

Looks like ATI put a lot of work into the new chip and have plenty of room to grow.

8 - Posted by JGFgKnnI on March 18, 2008 - 11:28 pm

Nice site!

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