Along with the X850XT PE, ATI also introduced the X800XL a couple of months ago. While the X850XT PE is their highest-end product, we were more interested in the X800XL but due to limited sample availability, we were not able to acquire one at that time. We have that card from ATI today and lets briefly talk about it before we head over to benchmarks.

Based on the new 110nm R430 chip, the reference 800XL is a single slot PCI-E x16 card that requires no additional power except for the one provided by the PCI-E bus. It has 16 pipelines which is the same as ATI’s higher-end X800XT and X850XT cards and comes with a default core speed of 400MHz and memory speed of 980MHz. The best bit about the 800XL is the price- which ATI has put at US$299. This is the same price as a vanilla 6800 card which has 12 pipelines and $100 less than the 6800GT card which offers 16 pipelines.

We’ve used our standard testbed which is made up of an Athlon64 3500+ Winchester CPU on a Gigabyte K8NXP SLI motherboard with 2 x 512MB Corsair memory modules timed at 2.0-2-2-5. For comparison, we used the 6600GT cards in SLI mode, the 6800GT card in regular as well as SLI mode and the ATI’s x800XT card. Keep in mind that the x800XL is the least expensive card in this comparison.