LOSTCIRCUITS

To SLI Or Not To SLI, That is Here the Question

If SLI is the all encompassing solution for higher performance, then it is not intuitive to see ATI distancing themselves from it, at least for the time being. Reasons cited are the complexity of technical support, difficulties in driver development etc. There is certainly some truth to that, on the other hand, tech support has been taken over primarily by the online community with a combined pool of knowledge way in excess of any manufacturer’s capability. With respect to drivers, arguably, this is one of ATI’s weaker points – just thinking about how long it took to come out with working 64-bit drivers for other than their legacy products.

One additional issue in the way of ATI's approach of SLI is the fact that nVidia has several pending patents on the technology in its current form. At present, the bulk of these provisional applications has not been published, which means that any foray into the same technology could be very costly -- for obvious reasons it is very difficult to work around things that are unknown factors. In other words, at this point, the only viable approach for ATI would be a technology exchange agreement with nVidia, since similar agreements may have been achieved on the level of DDR2 and 3, the obstacles may not be as grave as it would appear on the surface. On the other hand, we really don't know what would be involved to make it happen.

It is not surprising, therefore, to see ATI taking the conservative approach of speed-bumping their current line of graphics adapters that will be released on December 1 and hopefully be on the shelves sometime in January '05. However, we are looking at another conundrum here, even in the current lineup of graphics adapters, ATI has not been able to fill the demand for their high-end cards, meaning that it is basically impossible to find a Platinum Edition (X800XT-PE) without being subjected to highway robbery in the form of inflated retail pricing. Supposedly, most of the production has gone into the OEM channel, which raises the question of whether the person who buys a Dell system would even appreciate the difference.

Up to US$760.- for a RADEON X800XT PE are no exceptions, which is the main reason to show the ad above. We also did a search on Dealtime for other brand X800XT cards with or without Platinum halo, which in most cases returned the information that these cards have not been available for the past 30 days in the retail channel. In view of these findings we can, unfortunately, expect a hefty retail markup over the suggested manufacturer's pricing --- we would not be surprised to see the top end cards breaking the $1000.- barrier regardless of ATI's suggestions.

All of this is supposed to change later this week, we are going to see an entire new lineup of graphics cards based on some revamped cores, that is, the R430 (new 110 nm process) and the R480 (tweaked R423 core for more reliably reaching high clock speeds - including new power management features) that are supposed to dwarf even nVidia’s mighty SLI performance. The X850 series is still using the 130 nm process whereas the X800 series is being extended with the X800XL and plain vanilla X800 based on the new 110 nm process.

For the time being, we have to content ourselves with ATI’s claims showing some 5-50% performance gain over similarly priced nVidia cards, however, we will wait for the actual hardware to either confirm or dismiss the claims. Suffice it to say that the new lineup is rather impressive.

** Street pricing for the X800Pro and X800 SE (note that the other prices are msrp)

All X800 / X850 series cards are using a 256bit memory interface. Looking at the pricing / performance ratio in the table above, certain things don't add up but keep in mind that we are comparing msrp (lower) with actual street prices (higher), which may be responsible for the mismatch.

All cards as described above are PCIe versions, in fact, it does not appear as if there are plans to release any X850 cards for AGP. Considering that these cards are primarily targeted towards the high-end gaming community and given the notoriously weak gaming performance of the Pentium4, this is another conundrum, however, it will probably fuel the sales of the nForce4 chipset boards.

No Fire Without Smoke

The RADEON X850XT PE requires a dual slot cooling solution. Picture reproduced with permission from TheInquirer

Upping the core speed of the X850XT PE to 540 MHz is not going to make the card run cooler. We mentioned that the revamped R430 core has some additional power management features, which, in turn, will reduce thremal dissipation. However power management only kicks in during idle phases or under reduced load, on the other hand, the last situation on earth where a die hard gamer would tolerate his or her card going into thermal shutdown is in the middle of a heated battle - which is where the card runs full blast. The countermeasure is to increase the cooling capacity and finally we see an ATI card with dual slot cooling apparatus.

Thermally more civilized appear the new 110 nm process based X800XL and X800 that are further characterized by the lack of an auxiliary power connector to indicate power consumption below 75W. Cooling is done by ATI's new UHE Design - whatever that stands for.

In a few days, the embargo on benchmarks will lift to reveal the true face of these cards. Are they going to be the answer to SLI? I guess we'll find out.

For more info on the upcoming ATI cards check the following links on theInquirer:

X850 pricing, availability and performance are here
ATI's R430, X800 XL/X800 details revealed

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