Conclusions
Despite claims that its X800 architecture scales down to eight- and four-pipe designs, the low end of ATI's PCI Express Radeon X-series is dominated by last year's technology. Not that there's anything wrong with last year's technology, though. The X600 and X300's RV360 roots leverage a proven rendering pipeline, full 24 bits of pixel shader precision, and the most gorgeous antialiasing around.

Other than PCI Express support and a slight memory clock boost for the XT, the X600 line doesn't offer much over ATI's existing Radeon 9600 series products. However, the X300 is a significant improvement over ATI's previous value workhorse, the DirectX 8-class Radeon 9200 series. ATI expects the Radeon X300s to be twice as fast as the 9200s, which is a pretty significant leap when you add DirectX 9-class shaders to the equation.

At the high end of ATI's PCI Express line, the Radeon X800s shouldn't disappoint, especially if dual DVI ports will be an option from some OEMs. However, I can't get over the gaping hole between the X600 XT and X800 Pro. That gap should be filled by the time PCI Express platforms become readily available in retail, but until then, it's a window of opportunity for ATI's competition and an unsightly blemish on an otherwise complete line of DirectX 9-class GPUs with PCI Express support.