ATI Radeon X1800 XL Review

The Radeon X1800 XT Reference Board from ATI

We disassembled the video card heatsink to take a look, see Figure 4. As you can see, the base of the heatsink – the part that touches the graphics chip – is made of copper. The heatsink fins are also made of copper, as you can see in Figure 5.

Figure 4: Video card with its heatsink detached.

Figure 5: Base and fins are made of copper.

This video card uses eight GDDR3 256-Mbit 1.4 ns chips from Samsung (K4J55323QG-BC14)to give it 256 MB of video memory (256 Mbits x 8 = 256 MB). These chips can run up to 1.4 GHz. Since this video card accesses the memory at 1 GHz, there is an amazing 40% headroom for memory overclocking inside the memory’s specifications. But of course you can try overclock it over its specs. So, in theory this video card has highly overclockable memories. Keep in mind that we are talking about a pre-production sample; the final model from ATI partners can use a different memory chip model.

Figure 6: 1.4 ns GDDR3 memory chip used by ATI Radeon X1800 XL reference board.

The reference board has video capture function (VIVO), using ATI Rage Theater chip.

Figure 7: ATI Rage Theater chip for video capture.