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The Radeon x800 XL 256 & 512 MB
The card my friends is an affordable and considering the high framerates it can accomplishing in games, one hell of an attractive piece of gaming gear. The little ogre was manufactured under codename R430 and is actually built on the smaller 0.11 micron fabrication process. The product was of course initially purely intended for the PCI-Express platform. But hey, you will see the AGP version also. Thanks to the addition of a little "bridge" chip the silicon can be made backwards compatible for all your AGP lovin'.
The Radeon x800 XL sits in-between the mid-range Radeon x700 series and the high-end x800XT/850XT range. Initially I expected it would have 12 pixel pipelines to compete directly with NVIDIA's 12-pipe GeForce 6800, I was wrong, this product offers you 16 working pipelines at a very competitive price level.
So in essence you might ask yourself, "why is this 16 pixel pipelined puppy performance wise somewhat slower then the top of the line then?" That can be found in two central factors. First off, the cheaper 0.11 micron build does not allow significantly higher core speeds at this time. We are looking at 400 MHz where the 0.13 micron 850 XT PE manages 540 MHz. Rigth now we are testing an AGP version of the x850 XT PE, that bugger can reach almost 600 Mhz! Imagine that.
Anyway
, somewhat cheaper memory was used making the XL a very competing product. The XL is using roughly 2x500 MHz and that XT PE uses 2x590 MHz. When we go from 256 towards 512 Mb, does that make the product more expensive? Most certainly. And that might make this 512 MB product loose its mojo a little.$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : RADEON X800 Series
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 1002 (ATI)
$0000000002 Device ID : 554d
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff ATI specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0900000000 Graphics core : R430 (16x1)
$0900000002 Memory bus : 256-bit
$0900000001 Memory type : unknown
$0900000003 Memory amount : 512MB
$0900000004 Core clock : 398.250MHz
$0900000005 Memory clock : 492.750MHz (985.500MHz effective)
Other then that there really is not much product differentiation in the entire x800/x850 line of products. So you see, this is a somewhat caged VPU (graphics core) that would like to do more then it is allowed to. Keep this in mind when we will show you the overclocking results. 3D Feature wise this new R430 part does not differ from the x800 series or x850, except from what we heard some Power Management features and Thermal Throttling capabilities. Nothing notable though, except in this case 512 Mb of framebuffer.
| Type | Radeon X700 Pro | Radeon X700 XT | Radeon X800 Pro | Radeon X800 XL | Radeon X800 XT | Radeon X800 XT | Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition | Radeon X850 XT | Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition |
| codename | RV410 | RV410 | R420 | R430 | R420 | R423 | R423 | R480 | R480 |
| Interface | PCI-Express x16 | PCI-Express x16 | AGP | PCI-Express x16 | AGP | PCI-Express x16 | AGP/PCI-Express x16 | PCI-Express x16 | PCI-Express x16 |
The Board
Flashback. Yes it looks 100% similar to the "older" x800 Pro and XT doesn't it? You of course recognize it immediately by the similar looking active fan. What more does the eye catch? That's right, did you spot it already? An external PSU connector is needed where our tested 256 Mb versions of the XL did not need it.
Radeon x800 XL - 512 MB GDDR3 memory
Back to the fan, any board partner can of course can use their own cooling solution. The last thing that we notice on this reference model is the fact that the card has three output connectors, two DVI-I and in the middle we see the traditional video in/output connector, in this case the card was equipped with the Rage Theater chip and thus has the optional video capabilities through that same connector.
