ATI Radeon X800Pro

[RazorDX]

Some of you may recall a few weeks ago, ATI was having a clearance sale on their X800 series cards, so I took the opportunity to pick up the AGP version of the X800 Pro for 193 dollars shipped. It comes with a nice 256MB of GDDR3 memory with a stock speed of 450mhz (900 in DDR), and the R420 chipset at a stock speed of 475. It comes sporting 12 pixel piplines and 6 vertex shader pipelines. It features a standard D-Sub output, as well as DVI and SVideo.

Straight out of the box the installation was painless. I pulled my old Radeon 9600, and put this baby in there. Upon booting I put the disk in, installed the drivers, rebooted and voila. The first thing I did was start Doom 3 up and crank the settings to max. I was expecting better framerates, and got exactly what I was looking for. I threw some 4X AA on there as well and at 1024x768 it didn't even studder. If you are upgrading from an nVidia card, you may experiences some driver issues but if you are going from ATI to ATI or using it in a new build, it would be quite simple. I am using this card with an Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice) and a MSI K8N Neo2 board, along with 512MB of ram.

Something that surprised me was the excellent cooling solution. This card features a nice copper heatsink with a pretty good ball-bearing fan on it. When you start up it spins at full speed, then reduces to about 60% speed until the temps rise. The thing is though... they don't rise. This thing idles around 38C and under full load it goes up to 51C. Compare this to the 60C idle speed of the evenly priced 6600GT and you can see a difference in overclocking potential.

Using ATI-Traytools, I used the automatic overclock to increase clock speeds from 475/900 to 515/1000 with only a 3 degree increase under full load. For stock cooling, that is pretty impressive.

Overall I am extremely satisfied with my purchase. It was a refurb, but backed by a 3 year warrenty it is as good as new. If I were to buy this retail on Newegg, I would have paid around 50 dollars more minus shipping for a Sapphire, and for that price you would be better off going with the ATI X800XL. Same card, except with 16 pixel pipelines. If the XL has the same heating solution as this card, then it would be without a doubt the best solution for the gamer on a 250 dollar budget.

All in all, I give this card a 9/10.

Pros:
Excellent performance
Superior cooling system
Great price
Both D-Sub and DVI connectors
Excellent overclocker


Cons:
12 pixel pipelines as opposed to 16 of the XL/XT

[kirab]

Thanks for the great review! I just bought my own parts for my system (also with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+) and I decided to go with a refurbished Radeon X800 PRO PCI-E from Shop ATI. I'm still awaiting my other parts to arrive so I can stick that video card in there! :)

[pam123]

I came to the same decision, after deciding that the budget just wouldn't stretch to the X800XL, and ordered one as well.
I'm waiting patiently, since it should still arrive before Oblivion is out.

[RazorDX]

As a follow up, this card can handle Oblivion with High settings at 1280x1024 without going below playable framerates (30FPS). If you have the entire Imperial Guard trying to simultaneously beat you to a pulp your framerate can take a hit, but chances are you are dead anyway.

By the way this is using Omega 2.6.87 drivers. Everything after Catalyst 5.12 caused problems for me (AGP Texture Accelleration wouldn't kick in), so I rolled back to 5.1 and eventually put the Omega drivers on. I get no graphical glitches on textures like many reviews state when comparing ATI to nVidia cards, so it must just be the new drivers or something.

It's been over 8 or 9 months since I've upgraded, and since then I've increased resolution and the card is still going strong, playing everything I throw at it. (I have also since then upgraded to faster HDD and twice the RAM)

[BatMon]

One thing is that I hate Radeons with a passion. I bought one I forget the chip name (I'll tell you when I'm on my home PC) but it was good probably 70-80 FPS when playing games. It was supposedly the better chip. I changed one setting in the game and then the chips FPS went to 30. I changed the settings back and it still had 30 FPS. I reformatted windows and the chip is still fried. I like to stick with GeForce now.

[not important]

Good recvew but I have to question one statement.
[Compare this to the 60C idle speed of the evenly priced 6600GT]
I have a 6600GT, with passive cooling, that never gets over 60C under a hard load.

[glc]

Different brand cards with the same chipset have different cooling methods, and temperatures are also affected by your particular installation - case air flow, etc. You can't generalize here.

[RazorDX]

My environment isn't optimal, but it isn't an oven either. I'm not going to argue that a Zalman passive cooling unit could do the same thing, but for what I paid for a stock vanilla ATI card (a refurb as well, mind you), the cooling was quite a bit better than I expected.

The airflow in my case is pretty good, but the video card doesn't get much of it. I moved everything into a tiny little case once with horriblte airflow, and my chipset/cpu temps skyrocketed. My Radeon, however, only went up about 3 or 4 degrees. IMO a real test isn't what it can do when it's in an optimum environment, but what it can do when the environment is working against it.

I will, however, be putting a Zalman VGA cooler on it in a month or so (I've hit a financial pit in the last month, my paychecks won't be coming for another week), so when I do I can give you a better portrayall of overclocking potential.

There are much better options now, though. At the time of writing this review, this card was a good competitor for it's price range. The X800GTO is the same chip downclocked a bit, but if you get the PCI-E version many have successfully unlocked it to match an X800XT/X850XT on stock cooling.