Radeon X1800XT 512MB reviewed!

[Dashken]

ATI FINALLY launched its highly anticipated R520 core and it's finally ready to share the details with the world. The company had many problems and delayed this product massively but now when the cards are out things are going to get better for them.

R520 will have two variations and just as we said in our articles R520XT, Radeon X1800XT will be clocked at 625MHz core and 1500MHz memory and Radeon X1800XL clocked at 500MHz, 1000MHz. The card has sixteen pipelines or sixteen Shader cores - that's how ATI likes to call its pipes nowadays. The chip of sixteen pipelines has 321 million transistors.

ATI taped out its card back in November 2004 and it took it many re-spins to fix all that needed to be fixed. It had some transistor problem that took seven months to be fixed. The chap that fixed it got a nice big bonus, we understand.

Back in late August we learned that ATI will reveal the whole generation of cards in early October and that’s exactly how it happened. ATI also revealed RV530, Radeon X1600 XT or PRO and its entry level RV515, Radeon X1300XT pro or Hypermemory.

Of all the cards it announced today, the Radeon X1800XL and X1300 will be available while it will ship X1800XT one month later in retail. Nvidia will insist that this is a paper launch and we can say that it's kind of right as not all of the products are available, still we saw them up and running so they exist and are just delayed.

We had just enough time to plug Radeon X1800XT clocked at 625/1500 MHz to our test bed and compare it with Geforce 7800GTX clocked at 430MHz core and 1200MHz memory. We used ATI pre release drivers and Nvidia's 78.01 as Nvidia didn’t want to send us its 81.84. Nvidia is not happy with the INQ as it implies that everyone that is not following its PR story tips has been brainwashed by ATI. NV30 all over again.

R520, Radeon X1800XT has a massive dual slot cooler and the air coming from it turns out to be the hottest that we ever experienced. Nevertheless, the card can be heavily overclocked and it turned to be very stable during all of our testing.

ATI used an Ipod-like very fancy looking white cooler and as we said it gets its job done. The card has internal 512 Mbit memory ring and features 512 MB of memory.

Conclusion
I promised both Nvidia and ATI that if ATI wins I will title the article "R520 Fudo kicks Nvidia's butt" or if Nvidia ends up faster I would write "Nvidia kicks R520 Fudo's butt". I could not use either, as in most of the tests the scores were tight. They were too tight that I just could not give the credit to any of the cards. X1800XT is a fast and a nice card and when it comes to gaming will provide you all that you need. But so will almost the identically performing Geforce 7800GTX. The only difference is that you can buy 7800 GTX now and you could get this kind of performance back in July, while it will take four more weeks to get a new Radeon X1800XT in your machine.

Radeon has 512MB of memory, but Nvidia is coming out with such a card and you can clearly see that 512MB doesn't make any kind of significant difference in all of the tests. As Nvidia likes to say, SLI is still faster than any X1800XT card but ATI's Crossfire is just around the corner.

You can overclock Nvidia but I suspect that X1800XT can go much higher to 700 MHz easily and we will let you know what happens when that takes place. Be aware that whatever you buy is a top notch card and will let you drive your games at sick resolutions and with every, I really mean every effect on.

R520, Radeon X1800XT is finally out but it's too close to Geforce 7800GTX to crown any of the cards as the performance king. X1800XT turns out to be faster in many cases, but do you really care that much about being one to two FPS faster? If you do, the Radeon X1800XT is the card for you but than again you will lose in Doom 3. Whichever you buy, you will be happy.

Click here for the review: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26720

[ZuePhok]

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz..ATI is boring

[Dashken]

LOL! A review at extremetech.com concluded that X1800XT is about 15-20% faster than 7800GTX. Which to believe?

[Chai]

As usual, ATI is faster in DX, Nvidia is faster in OGL.

[Papercut]

Originally Posted by Dashken

LOL! A review at extremetech.com concluded that X1800XT is about 15-20% faster than 7800GTX. Which to believe?

You gotta see which driver set they are using for the 7800GTX. The newest ones give quite a performance boost, I think.

[ZuePhok]

yup about 6-8fps..

[Dashken]

Yeah, they are using Release 80 driver... 81.81...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1867208,00.asp

[PsYkHoTiK]

Booo... Crossfire suxorz...

[ZuePhok]

NV went for a more relaxed, reasonable architecture,
more pipes, more execution engine, and this design allows them to run the GPU at slower clock speed, and thus resulting a very good yield -> excellent availability -> good sales -> consumer happy -> employee gets fat bonus -> YAY.

ati on the other hand, went for a 16 + high clock speed configuration, which is due to the bad yield of their 24 pipe and above cores

as you now, high clock speed -> bad yield -> hot + dual slot -> very limited retail units + paper launch -> unsatisfied consumer -> stock dropped to its lowest point (52 weeks) -> warranty reduction

one thing that annoys me a lot is that, they are now shifting their attention toward the forumers as well by inviting these guys to their product launch.. and other sort of funny funny parties. Do they have anything to do with your media kit and refreshment? the worst is that instead of sending the already very limted samples to smaller but yet respectable sites, ATI sent a couple of them to some famed overclockers. I dun see the point of boosting your card's overclocking capability if we cant buy them.

please leave the forum clean u PR bastards! leaking private email to non-related party just because you want to protect your company mage..well.. only pervert does that (referring to Azerbalbalbalbalb, ATI's PR). as we can see now, what HA.com published was correct and shame on drivenheaven.com! they should be removed from the tech publication industry.

btw, regarding their warranty reduction, stop believing everything published by legitreview. as Ed says, they are too naive and has been influenced by these PR guys (yet another site..sigh)

the real story behind the move, here -> http://www.overclockers.com/tips00846/

[zachig]

I still think the X1800 is one HELL of a card!!!