ATI Radeon X1800 XL Review

Introduction

Radeon X1800 XL is part of the new high-end graphics chip family from ATI, competing directly with GeForce 7800 GT from NVIDIA. We’ve got a reference sample for this model from ATI, so we will compare its performance to other members of the Radeon X1000 series, to previous ATI chips and also with competing products from NVIDIA. Theoretically this video card was released yesterday, but so far we couldn’t find it for sale.

Figure 1: Radeon X1800 XL reference board.

We’ve posted a complete article explaining what’s new on Radeon X1000 series, so we won’t be repeating here everything we have already explained there. The big news is that all chips from this series are finally supporting Shader 3.0 model (DirectX 9.0c).

There are two chips on Radeon X1800 family: X1800 XT and X1800 XL. X1800 XT runs at 625 MHz and accesses its memory at 1.5 GHz (48 GB/s) and it will reach the market only on November 05th, 2005 at a suggested price of USD 499 for the 256 MB version and USD 549 for the 512 MB version. X1800 XL runs at 500 MHz, accesses its memory at 1 GHz (32 GB/s) and according to ATI should have arrived at the market yesterday, at a suggested price of USD 449.

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison table” the difference between this new chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from NVIDIA.

You can see the Radeon X1800 XL reference board on Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2: ATI Radeon X1800 XL reference board.

Figure 3: ATI Radeon X1800 XL reference board, back view.

Let’s now take a closer look at the Radeon X1800 XL reference board from ATI.