Better late
than never they say, they being ATI of course. After a six
month delay the Radeon X1000 series is finally upon us. This
is ATI’s answer to the GeForce 7 series and it is what we
have been eagerly awaiting all this time. The previous
generation Radeon X800/X850 products were fighting a losing
battle against NVIDIA’s more up-to-date, more powerful
GeForce 7 graphics cards. It would seem as though ATI has
done their best to make the wait worth it by including a
whole line-up of new features. This new graphics
architecture features “Shader Model 3.0 support” along with
several other new and important technologies.
Rather than
increase the rendering pipelines for the Radeon X1000
series, ATI has shrunk the die and gone for higher core
clock frequencies. Using a 90nm TSMC process, core
frequencies of over 600MHz are achievable. The Radeon X1000
series currently consists of seven graphics cards featuring
price tags that range from as little as $80 through to $550.
The Radeon X1300 HyperMem is the cheapest of the bunch
featuring just 4 pixel pipelines, 2 vertex pipelines, 450MHz
core clock and a 1GHz memory clock. The Radeon X1600XT is a
mid-range option featuring 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex
pipelines, 590MHz core clock and a 1.38GHz memory clock
speed.
The more
serious products in this new ATI line-up come from the
Radeon X1800 series. Here we have the Radeon X1800XL and
X1800XT, both of which utilize 16 pixel pipelines and 8
vertex pipelines. The Radeon X1800XL core clock speed is
500MHz and the memory clock is 1GHz, the MSRP is $450. The
Radeon X1800XT is $100 more expensive as it packs higher
core and memory clock frequencies. The Radeon X1800XT core
comes clocked another 125MHz higher and the memory operates
at another 500MHz! Both these Radeon X1800’s can be either
configured to use 256MB or 512MB of memory.
Today’s
review will be focusing on one of the more high-end Radeon
X1000 graphics cards, the X1800XL. As I have discovered when
using GDDR3, it is highly overclockable. Though given the
already very high frequency of the X1800XL memory,
overclocking headroom at this stage is questionable. Like
many of today’s graphics cards this Sapphire Radeon X1800XL
is physically no different in appearance from the ATI
reference design. This is a little disappointing as I was
really hoping to see Sapphire do something impressive with
their Radeon X1800XL.
The new
Radeon X1000 series is also CrossFire ready, though the
master cards are not yet available. Although this technology
is not available for review right now, there are a number of
interesting features that will aid the performance of
CrossFire. The master cards will include a dual-link TMDS
receiver that will enable resolutions above 1600x1200 to be
used when in CrossFire mode. ATI’s Avivo technology includes
hardware and software technologies that refine video capture
and playback, indented to improve playback display quality.
This review
will compare the Radeon X1800XL to the GeForce 7800 GT and
Radeon X850XT PE. Currently the GeForce 7800 GT is not only
cheaper than both the Radeon X1800XT and X1800XL, it is also
widely available. This means that it will be imperative that
the Radeon X1800XL is superior to that of the GeForce 7800
GT in the majority of the benchmarks. Before we move on to
the benchmarking phase, let’s take a moment to go over the
Sapphire card design and features.
