Is anyone else STUNNED by the prices of these cards?

8500 debuted at $299, GF4 Ti4600 @ $399, 9700 arrived at $299

These prices are crazy. Why do you people buy video cards that cost $5-600 when you should know they will be obsolete in at most 6 months! Go voice of the public (dumbasses with big wallets)....

FSCK! god damn flash ads crashing my firefox and disrupting my fricken reading of this review

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRr

"The ATI-branded version of this puppy is supposed to be available at online resellers today, right as the product launches."

I looked and found nothing.

tbh i think this is pretty appalling from ATi. These cards are basically ramped clock speeds. What about all those poor sods who spent rediculous amounts on their *in stock* X800 XT's only to now find that 1-2 months later ATi are going to shortly b releasing even more cards.

If i had purchased a ATi X800 card over a GF6800 cardif id be extremely pissed off.

If anything these new cards prove that the GF6800 won the battle upon release.

Good article, however I must say I am extremely disappointed by the results of SLI.
I would like someone to tell me why a dual-card configuration can be not significantly faster than a single-card one (except for Doom 3, but I'm not playing that, so I don't care). There's something there that does not compute. Is it a driver issue, or is the hardware implemented correctly ? Or maybe the CPU is not fast enough ?
On the other hand, kudos to ATI for holding the performance against SLI in HL2. That is very impressive.

ugh all this crappy made Flash is slowing everything down.

$550 vapor card....Wow! :-)

I am waiting for PCIe to become the standard and for the spec to improve.
For my money I would rather run an SLI setup. ATI is grasping at straws, like Intel they will have to realise that Mhz is not the answer.

this is wonderful . the x800xt pe is rare as a virgin at an adult film start convention and they are comming out with another new card . why not make a few of the current card first ? and this is comming from an ati fanboi

It's amazing what the top end card can do, it's actually competitive in some benches with a 6800 Ultra SLI setup. You'd think that the dual-cards would just stomp over everything (and to be fair they mostly do) but the X850XT PE keeps up better than you'd expect.

Where is other latest NV48? yet? :S
well, X800XL look better, but not much better than even X800XT....I guess so 6800Ultra SLI beats the everythings now. Whatever...I alway stick single slot graphic card only, if two slot graphic card, it would not fit small factor case do like that. Hey, this is good review...

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Just as a fyi since the topic is hittin on it, im runing redhat 9 with firefox 1.0, i loaded up java 1.4.2 and have no browsing issues...

my windows box with 1.0 is also just fine with java "1.5.0"

maxx

Not bad, this came sooner than I expected. But nothing groundbreaking. Does anyone think we'll ever see another graphics performance jump like the first GeForce cards or the 9700Pro?

Excellent as always. Did a great job with the selection of cards.

At first I was disappointed by the results but I realized this is nothing more than a replacement card to help cut down costs and help availability. If you get a few more fps out of it then excellent. I too am anxious to see how the lower priced cards perform, if that 400$ card can knock a 6800gt off its perch then I know what card I will be buying.

"Some folks have pointed out that different models of graphics cards may vary with respect to the amount of voltage going to the graphics chip or memory."

Thank you sir. You show a 6800gt sli though, weren't the test cards ultras? Not a big deal of course but thought I would point that out.

I have never really cared about dual slot coolers. I mean a lot of people go out and Buy dual slot coolers to replace their single ones. If this thing is quiet then excellent job ati. I like how they bring in cool air from the outside to blow over the card. It still puzzles me why nvidia didn't do the same.

*Oh and I also frequently have a high cpu usage while browsing TR. It is firefox's fault though; it seems to totally choke on any type of flash. If I have enough tabs open it will literally stop scrolling via the mouse wheel. I guess the flash is the culprit but even after I have blocked every last add/picture I still get 40% usage while scrolling (I won't keep them blocked). Almost made me think about using IE (since IE also has superior "smooth" scrolling) but I will never give up tabbed browsing.

One more thing on dual slot coolers, its not that big a deal.... i have been removing stock coolers and planting cpu heatsinks on my VPU's since they began using clips. Unless your running 5 pci slots (and what the hell would you need 5 for?) i think anyone pissing all over themselves for losing a pci slot for a powerfull VPU cooler is just nuts in general...

maxx

The multi-textured fill rate for a 6800 Ultra SLI setup in 3dmark is over 13 giga-texels per second! F$%K! Remember when a gigapixel fill rate was a lot?

After reading this review, bar graphs > line charts

Thoughts, in no particular order:
- Awesome review.
- Goddamn... they really did do something there for Doom 3. Props to ATi - considering how a few months ago the X800XTPE was in a dead heat with the plain 6800, and now it's inching up on the Ultra, that's pretty amazing.
- Other than that, performance seems relatively unchanged at the high end. SLI beats everything, X800/50XTs beat everything else, 6800GT beats X800 Pro.
- I was especially keeping an eye on the 6600GT/X700XT. I remember the X700XT winning like one bench at 1600x1200 4x8x, where it got 17fps to the 6600GT's 16. Other than that, the 6600GT swept. Odd, considering they were mostly even back in the X700XT review.
- The 6800 was conspicously absent from some of the 1600x1200 4x8x graphs, but based on the results available, it's not really worth buying a 6800 over a 6600GT, assuming the latter does actually get down to its MSRP of $200 sometime. (If it's $240 vs $270, then that's about how much extra the 6800 is worth). They were in a dead heat most of the time, with the 6800 occasionally gaining a slight margin.
- ATi's feet should be aching pretty badly by now considering the amount of times they've had to insert them in their mouths* in the past few months. App-specific optimizations, dual slot coolers... what next, fairies, mermaids, and OpenGL? (* - for some reason I wanted to pluralize that in the same way as mouse - mice o_O)
- 3DMark05 actually seems like a fairly accurate measure of performance this time around. Interesting.
- wtf @ the X850 Pro having less fillrate than the X800XL, and being listed for $50 more.
- The R430s are looking pretty damn nice from out in the distance here. 6800GT and 6800 beaters, respectively, for $50 less than each. X800 Pro at $300, as well.
- I'm eagerly awaiting nVidia's response (NV41/48). Hopefully they won't take the high road and will lower their prices to match ATi's now very competetive ones. I'd say that it's what I'd actually consider buying, the whole Linux thing, you know, but that'd actually be false, as I won't likely go above a 6600GT anyways, which is already pretty clearly the winner at its pricepoint.
- Phew. That was a bit more thoughts than I originally thought I had when I started typing this.

Scott,
Was it easier or harder passing the x850 from your rectum than is was the twin 6600s?
lollers

(read the comments under the recent SLI writeup if you missed the gag, folks)

Great review Scott, nice work. ;)

Until I can actully go to best buy/frys and find 850's in stock i'm not even going to read the review. Nothing against the editiors mind you.

maxx

Does anyone else hate the look of that cooler as much as I do?

So, does the first ever "Built by ATi" twin-slot cooler suck air in from the case and blow it out the back, or do those many, many watts of heat get dumped right underneath your CPU?

It's a serious point. Hot air belongs outside the case. I'd feel sorry for Prescott owners trying to keep their CPU's cool directly above another near-100W heatsource....

flash...neweggg and OCZ ownz firefox...!!! ahahaha

Thresher if your using IE at work you can go into the security tab and turn the active x warning off cant remember exactly how to do it though .

Quick note, the linkage to the HL2 demos is broken, though I found it pretty quickly in your SLI review...

(Looks for a fun night of seeing how far behind the leaders a 9600XT is...)

Hey, plain X800 at $249. Not bad.

oh...man...can I say WTF....can I ???

they are in a real fight with NV. I wasn't expecting this thing before '05. Are they really in a 6 month product cycle....? Cool card...great review...but where is my X700 here in my country ???

800 XL looks to be the king of the hill, as far as price/performance ratio.
Reminds me much of my 9800Pro 128 meg edition, good performance but greater value when I bought it.

If I look to keep an ATI card in my box the XL gets my vote, well done TR.

It's gonna take a while for me to get used to the profile of that cooler. At the moment, its the ugliest thing I've ever seen attached to a graphics card.

First Post! oops, you just beat me.

Great review, even though I haven't read it yet and am just posting because I like to be first. GJ as usual TR.

Edit: Now that I have read the review, seems like the X850s are going to overclock a lot better. B3D says the Overdrive rating could go as high as 648Mhz on the core.