|
Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors WebNews Home |
. | . |
Prices: Mainboards ABIT ASUS Chaintech Shuttle Soyo Tyan CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ |
LOSTCIRCUITS |
|
| ASUS RADEON X800Pro to XT | |
|
(Review by MS, June 16, 2004) |
|
ASUS RADEON 9600XT At: |
ASUS is one of ATI's prime partner in the graphics sector. A rich and innovative bundle has made their recent offerings stand out from the crowd of third party manufacturers of ATI or nVidia based cards. But that is not what we are talking about in this article.
Or not quite, at least. Rather, we were interested in what it takes to re-enable the catatonic pipelines in the X800 Pro series and how well the resulting home-made X800XT would perform. We have the details of the operation and the caveats and pitfalls along with the workarounds. Moreover, we have a few rather stunning performance numbers for your viewing pleasure.
Read On...
The latest family of ATI RADEON GPUs based on the R420 core have just entered the market, adding some additional 50% in performance over what even the RADEON 9800XT was capable of. Granted that the R420 is an evolutionary improvement over the R3xx core, aided by some driver improvements etc., but overall, at least if we can believe the press presentations of ATI, the new R420-core based X800 cards rock the graphics world.
Needless to say that nVidia has not been sleeping either but as so often, review samples are sparse, especially those of the ATI X800XT Platinum edition. This, of course, makes for an interesting situation since we were dying to get our hands on one of these new graphics monsters, on the other hand, ATI denied the availability of test samples and, thus, we embarked on building one ourselves.
Whoever read our or any of the other R420 core previews will be aware of the fact that the X800 Pro series and the X800XT series share the same core and are also with respect to most other features quite similar. The most pronounced difference, in fact, is the disabling of one of the four pixel pipeline quad-blocks, which leaves the “Pro” series with only 12 pixel pipelines, whereas the XT Platinum edition features full functionality of all 16 processing units. The second difference relates to the operating frequencies of memory and core, where the X800Pro sits at a civilized 475 MHz core speed, the X800XT sports no less than 520 MHz for the same.
Some technical specs in comparison with other RADEONs and GeForce FX
| Core Clock [MHz] | Pixel Pipelines | Texture Units/Pixel Pipeline | Fill Rate (Single) [MPixels/sec] | Fill Rate (Multi) [MTexels/sec] | Memory Clock [Mbps] | Memory Bus Width | Memory Bandwidth [GB/s] | |
| RADEON 9600 SE | 325 | 4 | 1 | 1300 | 1300 | 200 | 64 | 3.2 |
| RADEON 9600 XT | 500 | 4 | 1 | 2000 | 2000 | 600 | 128 | 9.6 |
| RADEON 9700 | 325 | 8 | 1 | 2600 | 2600 | 620 | 256 | 19.84 |
| RADEON 9800 | 380 | 8 | 1 | 3040 | 3040 | 680 | 256 | 21.8 |
| ASUS RADEON 9800 XT | 410 | 8 | 1 | 3280 | 3280 | 730 | 256 | 23.36 |
| GeForce FX5900 Ultra | 450 | 4 | 2 | 1800 | 3600 | 850 | 256 | 27.2 |
| GeForce FX5950 Ultra | 475 | 4 | 2 | 1900 | 3800 | 950 | 256 | 30.4 |
| ASUS RADEON X800ProA | 475 | 12 | 1 | 5700 | 5700 | 900 | 256 | 28.8 |
| RADEON X800XT Platinum Edition | 520 | 16 | 1 | 8320 | 8320 | 1120 | 256 | 35.4 |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme | 450 | 16 | 1 | 7200 | 7200 | 1100 | 256 | 35.2 |
We are really interested only in the two candidates marked in red, that is, the RADEON X800Pro and the RADEON X800XT Platinum Edition and, whether it is possible to take one and mod it into the other along with what it takes to accomplish this. And, of course, we won't limit ourselves to Mahjongg when it comes to checking out what we really accomplished.
If there are four blocks and those blocks can be selectively disabled, there has to be a binary scheme comprising 2 bits or switches to accomplish this. In other words, there has to be a switch or rather two to turn on or off the different quarters and all there may be required is to flip one of the switches back to the On position – and add the necessary firmware support in form of the binaries that hold the system configuration data. Suffice it to say that we will cover all necessary details a bit later. For the time being, let’s introduce today’s guinea pig, namely the ASUS RADEON X800Pro.
Next Page: => ATI à la ASUS =>
If you enjoyed reading this article and found it useful, please consider making a small donation to LostCircuits.