Radeon X1000 Series Reviews

The folks at Extremtech have posted a review of the new series of X1000 video cards from Radeon, their answer to the latest offerings from Nvidia, the GeForce 7800 GTX and the cheaper cousin the GeForce 7800 GT. Apparently they had some kind of circuit problem that affected the whole card and had to delay production until they figured out exactly where the problem was.

I’m not the type of guy who runs out and buys the latest hardware, I usually get it when the price has dropped some and is more readily available, as well as having more time to find out any flaws or problems it may have. But, if anyone buys one and would like to post their take, just post a comment and let me know. I love reading reviews and how this stuff fares in real world use, not just the published numbers.

Though ATI had a lot of problems with the flagship R520 product, which should have shipped last spring, all its other chips have been rolling along just fine. The company designed the Xenos graphics chip in the Xbox 360, which also uses a 90nm (.9 micron) manufacturing process, and it’s being mass produced already. And the rest of the R5xx graphics line, set to debut this fall, has been right on track. Simply put, none of these chips had that one hard-to-find circuit bug that held up the R520.

Delaying the R520 has had the negative effect of giving archrival Nvidia a big head start, but it also gave ATI the opportunity to launch an entire family of graphics products at once. The Radeon X1000 series, as it’s known, features a top-to-bottom line of products from $99 to $549, though not every single SKU is shipping today.

As much as we’re impressed with the overall performance and feature set of the X1800 XT, we’re a little disappointed in the X1800 XL?the one that’s shipping today, together with the budget X1300 cards.

It’s not that it’s a bad card?far from it! With all the talk of the advanced super-fast 90nm manufacturing process, and the extremely efficient architecture, it’s only just as fast as a GeForce 7800 GT at high resolutions with AA and AF enabled. Turn AA and AF off, and the Nvidia card is a little bit faster. We wouldn’t make a big deal about it, except that the suggested retail price is $449, while GeForce 7800 GT cards are widely available for $50 to $80 less. Not only that, but many vendors ship seriously overclocked 7800 GT cards with only a minimal price markup. For the Radeon X1800 XL to have earned a preferred status, it would need to be at least $50 to $100 cheaper, or maybe have standard clock speeds bumped up to 550/550 MHz from the default 500/500.

From Extremetech by way of Realtechnews.com.

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