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Round Up and Comparison of X800 XL graphics cards

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset X800 XL 256 MB, 256 bit

In general, there are three reasons why people buy more powerful graphics cards: higher frame rates, higher image quality with anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and higher resolution support. These three reasons are actually very closely related to each other. The faster the card is at processing polygon and textures, the more power it has to give playable frame rates with AA and AF at higher resolutions. Even if they price is higher, they're still worth the money - the more power a graphics card has, the higher frame rates you can enjoy at very demanding games, both the games that are coming out now or in the future.

Out of the available offerings from ATI (not counting the new X1K series), the X800XL is the most feasible choice. The faster XT and XT PE are still hard to find (even to this day), and not to mention very expensive. The main difference between each line in the X800 (and X850) series is core and memory clock, since they pretty much share the same architecture and design. ATI is also very likely will introduce new products (the X1800) to replace their aging high end offerings very soon, so no sense of putting money on the X800XT and XT PE (or even X850XT and XT PE). So then why still consider the X800XL? Price / performance - you can buy these cards for slightly more than half of the prices their asking for the X800XT, X850XT and the estimated price of next generation high end cards (the X1800 - the X1600 will have slightly lower performance). The X800XL has the bandwidth advantage to provide you with slightly higher fps, especially with AA and AF in higher resolutions.

Today, we're looking at four graphics cards based on the X800XL. They are (alphabetically) the ABIT RX800XL 256EDVIO, ASUS EAX800XL 2DTV256, GeCube X800XL 256 MB Uniwise and Gigabyte X800XL Silent Pipe (GV-RX80L256V).. While they're all based on reference boards, there are differences to ATI's own offerings (which we will get into later). Let's take a closer look at each of them.

Overview

ABIT RX800XL 256EDVIO
400/490 MHz

ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 398 MHz
Memory Clock : 492 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 92.5 points



Just by looking at the card, you'll easily notice that it ditches the reference cooling solution for a custom made one. The RX800XL is the only graphics card in this round up to have separate heatsinks for the RAM and the chip. One advantage of this approach is that the heat from the core doesn't spread to the memory chips. Unlike the core, the memory chips produces less heat, so passive cooling is enough. Another plus point to this design is that it can use air from the core's fan exhaust to cool the memory ram sinks (at least for the memory on the front). You'd still have to buy an extra fan to cool the memory on the back, but since they don't get hot enough, it's not necessary. To stick the ram sinks on the memory chips, ABIT used thermal adhesive, a necessity since they use a separate cooling solution. For the core, the heatsink is smaller than the other X800XLs, but that's not necessarily a bad thing - the copper heatsink used thicker stripes for a compromise between heat dissipation and noise (you can see them through the grates). Even with a smaller fan, the noise level is quite low, but more importantly the noise is not high pitched. There is a drawback to using a 'smaller' heatsink. Since it has slightly lower heat dissipation area, this card is hotter than the others.



The inclusion of two DVI output can be both a blessing and a curse. If you're using monitors with DVI input, it's a blessing but if you're using the two old analog monitors, you can only use one monitor since ABIT only bundle one DVI to analog dongle. You'd have to buy an extra one if you want dual monitor setup with analog monitors. For TV output, there's support for both RCA, composite and HDTV courtesy of the Rage Theater chip (on the back of the card). This means you also get video input capabilities with this card and ABIT has thoughtfully bundle some applications to make use of it. The cable / dongle is quite long, so you probably don't have to buy another cable (approximately 1,6 meters or 5 feet)- nice touch.

There's no game bundle for this card, although there's at least two applications: Cyberlink's PowerDirector and PowerDVD for playing DVDs and capturing videos. While the card has the ATI Overdrive feature, ABIT's own VGuru utility will not work with this card. You'll have to use to third party software for true, functional hardware monitoring, a shame really since the hardware is already available.

ASUS EAX800XL 2DTV256
400/490 MHz

ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 392 MHz
Memory Clock : 498 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 85 points



Easily the one with the biggest box, but not necessarily one with the most bundle. ASUS also used a custom heatsink for their EAX800XL for both chip and memory. This allows it to have a much larger heat dissipation area and a larger fan, made much more efficient with the presence of lots of thin stripes. However, there are some things we wish ASUS did different with this card, particularly their lack of cooling for memory chips. There are no cooling whatsoever for the memory chips on the back of the card. Even the memory chips in from are not directly in contact with the heatsink - a slight padding was used between the heatsink and the memory chip. We'd prefer a more direct contact, since it allows better heat transfer. Interestingly enough, the noise level is about the same as the ABIT RX800XL.

The ASUS EAX800XL 2DTV256 comes with two DVI outputs and for analog monitor users, there's the most needed DVI to analog dongle. Since the card also features the ATI Rage Theater chip, it also offers both video / TV out and input. Unfortunately, no HDTV output, but it is available as a bundle with a different card. The cable / dongle is quite long (approximately 1,6 meters or 5 feet), so you don't have to buy another cable or reach to the back of your PC to hook your TV up.

There's only one bundle game (Novalogic's Joint Operations) and no applications - a practice that is carried over from the EAX700 Pro. Another gripe we have with this card is compatibility with ASUS own SmartDoctor utility. In case you don't know, the SmartDoctor utility features hardware monitoring functions that monitors your card's temperature, fan speeds and voltages. However, the version that came with this card won't work at all. Even worse, it would crash the whole system every time it's run/ This happens both with the bundled drivers on the CD and ATI's Catalyst reference drivers.

GeCube RX800XL Uniwise
400/490 MHz

ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 398 MHz
Memory Clock : 492 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 90 points



While it might look different due to it's colors and cutout, the GeCube RX800XL Uniwise has a cooling solution similar to the ASUS EAX800XL. There are some differences which is a definite improvement. For one, the memory chips on the back of the card is cooled by a plate. It still uses paddings between the heatsink and the chips themselves. The back plate is perforated in several places to allow hot air from the components under the plate to escape. Another improvement is fan control: depending on whether or not you're running a 3D application (and our guess, core temperature), the fan will spin down and up accordingly. It allows the GeCube RX800XL Uniwise to run inaudibly when viewing the desktop and spinning to full speed when you run 3D games. It does produce noticeable noise at full speed, with a slightly higher pitch though, but not really noticeable on a closed case.



The GeCube RX800XL still features both analog and DVI output, one point analog monitor users will likely appreciate since they can use the standard DVI to analog dongle bundled for dual monitor setup. For additional output, you can connect your RCA / coax and HDTV with a bundled cable (approximately 1,5 meters or 5 feet). Since the cable is essentially an coax cable with HDTV extensions, you might not get the same quality should you use a dongle so you might have to directly connect the extension to the TV output connector on the card and use your own HDTV cable to connect the extension to your TV. There's no video input capabilities, so it should cost less than the other cards here.



As for the bundle, GeCube has a passably good bundle: one game (Counter Strike: Condition Zero) and one application (Cyberlink PowerDVD). There's no utility what so ever, which is a shame since it would be good to slow down the fan a bit under load to avoid that high pitched sound.

Gigabyte X800XL Silent Pipe
400/490 MHz

ATI Radeon X800 XL, 256 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 398 MHz
Memory Clock : 492 MHz (984 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 87.5 points



For the truly silent solution, Gigabyte's X800XL is worth a look. This card uses three pieces of heatsink, each of them in contact with each other. If you closely at the heatsink in the front, you'll notice that it's actually made of two plates - one that is in direct contact with the core and another on top of it. The inner plate is connected with the plate on the back of the card via two big heatpipes. In total, this heatsink features the most heat dissipation area of all the cards, a necessity since it lacks active cooling. Even so, we noticed several areas where Gigabyte (and Zalman) could've made some improvements. For one, the mounting isn't good, particularly the back plate. Rather than just relying on the lock, the screw should poke the plate on the back - it would have a more solid installation (not easily movable by accident). A padding on the screws (very much like the Alpha 8945) would keep the plate from actually touching the board (or components). Second, the heatpipe shouldn't be placed between the plate and the memory chips. The default position will just transfers heat from the core to the memory chips. So instead of cooling them down, it's actually heating them up. Third, a more flushed, direct contact between the heatsink and the memory is preferred. The memory on the bottom of the board is barely covered by the padding and memory chips on the front of the card is not touching the heatsink at all!. Thankfully, during testing we encounter no problems what so ever. Even after a torture test of half and hour of Doom 3, we noticed no slowdown or artifacts. We did noticed the heatpipe and the back plate to be very hot - reason enough to get a slow spinning 8 cm fan to cool it down. But even without the fan, the card just kept on going without problems and artifacts.



Just like the GeCube RX800XL, Gigabyte's X800XL still features both analog and DVI output, with a the standard DVI to analog dongle bundled. Besides having RCA / coax and HDTV output, this card also features video input, again with the use of Rage Theater chip. Unfortunately, the dongle has a very short cable (about 20 cm or 8 inches), so you probably will quite often reach to the back of your PC to connect cables or switch the dongle output between HDTV and SDTV.
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As for the bundle, Gigabyte has the most bundle - two games (Thief: Deadly Shadows and Joint Operations) plus two applications (Cyberlink's PowerDVD and PowerDirector) for video playback and capturing. There's also Gigabyte's own VTuner2, which much to our disappointment does not feature any hardware monitoring. We think that hardware monitoring is essential for passively cooled peripherals, even more so than actively cooled peripherals so you should invest on some third party software or hardware for health monitoring with this card.

Performance

Now for the performance evaluation. Since all these cards use the same reference design, they offer roughly the same level of performance. The Gigabyte X700 Pro 256 MB running at 427 MHz for the core and 433 MHz DDR for the memory is a hair faster than the ASUS EAX700Pro TVD 256 MB running at 425 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. The MSI RX700 Pro TD128E is the slower card, running at 420 MHz and 433 MHz DDR. So, you see, memory capacity is not the most important issue here.

We didn't experience any problems with any of the cards. Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.9 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

We've nearly reached the fps ceiling with our Athlon 64 3000+. Since the cards run at the same clock for both core and memory, we see very little difference. The ABIT RX800XL EDVIO256 and GeCube is a hair faster, but you certainly won't notice it in gameplay. Even on 1600 x 1200 with 4x AA and 16x AF, Call of Duty is fluid with these cards.


Even old games can still scale well - the GeCube X800XL Uniwise is the faster card here - again by a hair. Since this game is shader intensive, usually only a card with a higher clock is faster (maybe it's just a tiny bit faster). But since the differences are small, you won't notice it. Interestingly enough, GeCube also has a lower minimum fps than the other cards at one point, but the overall average fps is higher on all resolutions and with AF.


Again we're seeing the X800XL is basically rendering every frame as fast as the Athlon 64 3000+ can. We don't see any difference until we hit 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. The GeCube X800XL is still faster (up to 3 fps difference) but all cards produce around the same minimum and average fps (2 - 3 fps difference).


Nascar 2003 is already system limited on the X700 Pro and GeForce 6600GT, so we won't see any difference here. All cards basically have the same performance since it can render no faster than the processor. Out of the first four games, we can see that all X800XL have what it takes for high resolution gaming with AA and AF, even on 1600 x 1200. What does it take to bring down the fps on these cards? Let's look at newer games with more shader content and detail.


With this game, we're seeing that all cards is barely making the minimum 30 fps with and without AA and AF on 1024 x 768 (minimum fps). Granted, the parts we pick for the benchmark is the heaviest part of the game - with lots of explosions that literally fill the screen with smoke and dirt. The differences between the cards are not noticeable and are most likely due to the method we used to benchmark the game. So, all the cards offer the same level of performance.


Again we're seeing the GeCube X800XL Uniwise manage to get higher fps than the other cards, with the ABIT RX800XL and Gigabyte X800XL Silent Pipe very close behind it. With 2 to 5 fps difference from around 100 fps, it's hardly noticeable.


Normally we only see the average fps and if we do that here, we will probably dismiss this game as just another system limited benchmark. Not so - look at the minimum fps. The reason: explosions and smoke are really taxing these cards above 1024 x 768. Here we see something interesting. For the first time on 1600 x 1200. with AA and AF, the GeCube X800XL falls behind the other cards, probably due to lower minimum fps. It's the ABIT X800XL EDVIO and ASUS EAX800XL 2DTV256 who is faster here.


We've finally come to our latest game benchmark, Battlefield 2. Frame rates from run to run in this game does tend to fluctuate by 10%, so mind that fact when you're looking at the benchmark. Minimum frame rates overall should be around 2/3 of the minimum in this benchmark (such as walking into smoke from a smoke grenade going off near two tanks). We see the most obvious difference is in 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. Here, we see the ABIT RX800XL 256EDVIO is just slightly faster than the GeCube X800XL, but if we look closely we already see this trend in 1024 x 768 with AA and AF. The difference is still within the standard deviation, but it does persist from run to run and resolution to resolution, so the ABIT RX800XL 256EDVIO is most likely faster than the GeCube, although you won't notice the difference in gameplay. In conclusion, you can expect the same level of performance from any X800XL graphics cards out there, regardless of vendor, as long as they have similar clocks.

Conclusion:

In general, these cards are fast, enough for comfortable gaming up to 1600 x 1200 32 bit with 4x AA and 16x AF. However, on newer games you will have to tone down some effects. details, features or use a lower resolution (1024 x768) if you want no-lag-gameplay. While this may not seem like a good thing, it is. We're finally seeing games that makes real use of the processing power of these cards. So, even if you're not using the higher clocked Athlon 64s such as the Athlon 64 3500+, 4000+ of even the FX55 and FX57, there's still a very good and solid reasons to buy these cards.

Since the performance is generally the same for all cards, features and bundle will be the determining factor for most people. These cards basically very similar. To those who just want a basic package for gaming, we recommend the GeCube X800XL Uniwise. It has more than adequate cooling, offer just enough accessories and maintains compatibility with analog monitors. If you want more features, we recommend the ABIT RX800XL 256EDVIO. It's properly cooled with very acceptable noise levels (with no high pitched sound) and comes complete with video input / output plus HDTV support out of the box, not to mention it also has two DVI outputs. The only downside we can think of is the lack of bundled games.

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