When ATI launched the X800 series of graphics cards it consisted of the X800 Pro, X800XT and X800 XTPE. Back in November ATI released some updates to that range, those being the X800XL and X800 standard. We had our first look at the X800XL a couple of weeks back and were very impressed and now we’ve received our first retail X800 sample in for review. The X800 (£175) is priced in between the X700Pro (£140) and X800XL (£220) Radeons so it’s those cards we are testing against today.

The Card

The Radeon X800 comes with 256mb of memory and is clocked at 391/351. In comparison the X800XL (like the X800XT) is a 16 pipeline design the X800 closer in design to the X800 Pro and therefore features a 12 pipeline design. The core is of course a R430 and the card is running on PCI Express.

The card itself comes on a cool blue PCB and features the standard mainstream configuration of 1 DVI port rather than Dual DVI. When I opened the box I saw the cooler design and was quite disappointed, not because it looks particularly bad but because it is quite similar to the X700’s design which is slightly noisy. Luckily however Sapphire have improved on the X700 design (fan blades) and so the X800 cooler is just as quiet as the previous X800 models. You’ll notice also that no external power connector is required and therefore that all power for the card comes through the PCI express bus.

On the front of the card the memory is cooled by the heatsink/fan however on the rear the chips are not cooled as you can see from the picture below.

With this being a lower priced card you can also see that there is no rage theatre chip.

One very good selling point however is the memory sapphire are using on the X800, although the card is stock clocked at 350mhz for the memory the spec is 2.0ns and so should be good (in theory) up to 500mhz. We shall look at what the card is capable of in overclocking later in the article.