The Radeon X800 XL core is built on IBM's 0.11 micron manufacturing technology and the core contains approximately 160 million transistors. As you've probably noticed, the X800 XL uses a slightly smaller manufacturing process than the X850 (0.13 low-K), but ATi has always experimented with new technology on its lower-end cards.

The X800 XL core is clocked at 400 MHz, and has 16 rendering pipelines. The card is also backed up by 2ns Samsung memory which is clocked at a full 1 GHz using a 256-bit memory controller. That means the X800 XL VPU is basically the X850 but slightly smaller and running a bit slower. Let's see if overclocking brings it to the same level...

Overclocking the beauty!

Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 398MHz 441MHz Memory Speed: 984MHz 1113MHz

When it comes to overclocking ATI Radeon-based videocards, I feel that PCStats has had its best luck when dealing with 'official' built-by-ATi cards. We'll see if this holds true with the ATI X800 XL.

By default the X800 XL VPU is clocked at 398 MHz while the memory hums a long at 984 MHz, slightly lower than ATi's official 1 GHz rating.

Starting with the core, we raised the clock speed only a few MHz at a time since our last overclocking attempt with the Gigabyte GV-RX80L256V did not go very far. We easily passed the 421 MHz mark, the speed at which our other X800 XL videocard topped out, and continued upwards. We hit a strange issue at 442 MHz, where the ATI Radeon X800 XL started to show major checkerboard type artifacts. Oddly, at 441 MHz, the card was perfectly stable. A 10% core overclock isn't too shabby to start with though.

The first thing we did was set the memory to run at a full 1 GHz and it had absolutely no problems running at that frequency. Playing nicely, we then raised the memory speed in 4 MHz intervals and 1.01, 1.02 and 1.10 GHz fell by the wayside. The maximum speed we got the memory to was 1.11 GHz, very good for an ATi Radeon X800 XL class videocard!

The core and memory played nicely together and we could run both at their maximum overclocked speeds without issue. Considering the ATi Radeon X800 XL we tested is a retail version, the cards currently on the market should be quite good at overclocking too.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: dfi lanparty nf4 sli-dr (nf4-sli) gigabyte ga-k8nsnxp-939 (nf3 ultra) videocard: msi rx800xt-vtd256e gigabyte gv-rx80l256v powercolor x700 pro powercolor bravo x700 msi nx6800gt-t2d256e albatron trinity geforce 6600gt agp msi nx6600gt-td128 albatron trinity pc6600 asus extreme n6600top/td/128m/a gigabyte gv-3d1 (single mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (sli mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (single mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (sli mode) ati radeon x800 xl memory: 2x 512mb mushkin pc3200 l2 v2 hard drive: 74gb wd raptor 10k rpm sata hdd cdrom: aopen 52x combo powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w software setup windowsxp build 2600 nforce catalyst 4.12 detonator 66.93 benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 codecreatures aquamark gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 doom3 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems use a different motherboard but results are shown for reference. unfortunately there are no aquamark3 numbers for this review, we could not get the benchmark working.