X800XL Arrived! Free review for you guyz

(note: this is a free hype zone)

Just received confirmation from ATI! Card has shipped and should arrive in the next 5 business days!

Woohoo hurray yada yada!



People, you don't get it. My actual is a dying 9600SE, ok. SE. SE!!!!! Like, Sorry Excuse for a video card. Homo habilis is turning into Homo Sapiens. Lada is turning into Ferrari. You want proof?

Actual bandwidth: 3.2 GB/s
X800XL bandwidth: 31.2 GB/s



Actual pipelines: 4
X800XL: 16, + 16 pixel shaders



I'll spend the next few days benchmarking my actual card and I'll compare with the new one as soon as I get it. Feel free to join me (metaphorically) in my rejoicing as I'll post the results here.

For now, "Ceeeeeeelabrate good time, come on" tadadata...

I know how you feel. As soon as I get off work in 3 1/2 hours, I'm going straight to the FedEX place to pick up my X850 Pro I ordered several weeks ago, but because of a mix up, is just now getting here. Can't wait to overclock the shit out of it. Oh, and I'm upgrading from a vanilla 128mb 9600.

Well, as promised, here is my little review.

When I first posted that it would arrive "next week", it hadn't even shipped; it did so about 1 or 2 weeks later only, and arrived the next day in the afternoon.

Anyhoo, I'm among the lucky bastards who got the very last AGP X800XLs of ATI's clearance center, because the day after I received it the product was discontinued, both in Canada and in the US.

I took a couple photos which I thought were good, but now that I opened them in fullscreen I see they're all more or less blurry. Anyway you'll get to see them anyway, they're just not fantastic.

Simply put, this card ROCKS. In Doom 3, while I was forced to play with medium settings and a highly incomfortable framerate, I can now play at 1024x768 2XAA high quality at a steady 60fps. When I first got to see the full, fluid animation of an imp appearing from nothingness and throwing a fireball, I knew I playing Doom 3 with this video card was an entirely new experience.

Oblivion looks just so much better it's insane. With a 9600SE I was forced to play at 720*456, and my framerate just got horrible in outdoor scenes whatever I'd do. Now I play at 1024x768 2xAA 4xAF, large textures, 80% grass and trees; the most graphically-demanding forest scenes will lower my framerate to 20, but it's still perfectly enjoyable. Combat feels much more natural and dynamic; everything looks bright, detailed.
The game still stutters a lot when horse riding between regions, but there's not much to be done about that (and yes I know about all those .ini tweaks). Even a small number of NPCs can bring the framerate to near-crawl, something maybe related to my "slower" CPU - it's still a P4 2.8Ghz HT, but oh well, I'll live with it. Only a Conroe with dual-X1900XTs would cut it, I guess, and I don't have the money for that.

Here's one of my most beautiful shots of Oblivion with my X800XL:
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183 [...] d39ce0.png

Well, now to the specs. Actually, you don't really need them because there are plenty of reviews out there and my pictures suck.

But NO review will compare a 9600SE and a X800XL side-to-side!
http://img247.imageshack.us/img247 [...] 0sert5.jpg

Yes the photo is bad, but you can still see that the X800XL is a MUCH bigger card. Actually, when I did the comparison, I knew something would go wrong installing it. It just had to.

Something went wrong installing it.

As you can see onthis shot, (which is my only good one), the 9600SE feels really comfortable in there. But this shot spells bad knews about my X800XL bumping into my ram.

It bumped ito my ram when I installed it.

So I couldn't even slide it in. Now, you think, how the hell did that guy got that card working if it was bumping into his ram? Well, it was not bumping into the ram itself but in the little plastic latches that are designed to secure and release the sticks of ram.

But plastic is frail, I thought. So I went to my kitchen and retrieved a solid knife and started doing stupid things. Of course I couldn't slice plastic with a kitchen knife, so after thinking it over dinner, I decided to use a nail clipper, the biggest nail clipper I could find. And we have a nasty nail clipper, designed for slicing the biggest, thickest nail of the biggest toe of the biggest person in the family.

The nail clipper did wonders. Small plastic fragments of ram latches were sent flying all over the motherboard as I patiently reduced all three buggers to approximatly half their size. Here's a shotof the heroe. You can see tiny bits of white plastic on the table.

So, twisting the card ever so slightly (maybe half a millimeter), I finally got it down the AGP slot and locked the AGP latch in place. Then if anybody had been sleeping my repeated "YES!" would certainly have waken them up.

Here's a shot of the X800XL next to the reduced ram latches. Here's also a shot of the undamaged latches(on the other side) so you can see I'm not joking.

My X800XL was at its rightful place, firmly held by its one screw. Here it is, installed in all its glory. Here's another cool shot. So I booted the computer, knowing something would go wrong.

Something went wrong.

The computer didn't post and started beeping like mad. I almost knocked my head on the wall for having forgotten to plug the additionnal 4-pin power cable. I plugged it and booted again, knowing something else would go wrong.

Well at first it went ok, I installed the drivers, restarted, and delicately double-clicked on "Oblivion", knowing it wouldn't work of course.

It didn't work. It would load, but with lots of artifacts; and once in-game there were weird vertices appearing all over the place, deforming surfaces and making the game look like a total mess. Maybe the card was melting all over the motherboard, I thought. So I turned off the computer immediatly, and while doing so, I remembered that card wouldn't run in AGP 8X with my P4S800. I then proceeded to set it to AGP4X in the BIOS and thought, well, maybe this time it'll work ok.

And it did. So I'm happy now.

Ok, the card is a very bad overclocker, and when I tried disabling Anisotropic Filtering Optimisation with Oblivion alt-tabbed and the card running at about 5% faster than normal (half the maximum overclock recommended by most tech sites), my display just got messed up, freezed, and I was forced to restart manually. So now the only "overclock" I use is to force the card to run at its "official" specs: 400mhz core and 1000mhz mem. (It runs slightly slower by default: 398/986 - bastards!)

Benchies! You all crave for them, so here's the only one I actually did:

3DMark 05:

9600SE: 1200
X800XL: 4800

Yup, 4x the performance. That's also my performance in Oblivion: double the quality and double the framerate, that's 4 times the power. But in slightly outdated applications like Doom 3 the difference is even greater, probably about a 10:1 ratio.

End of the review.

ahah i saw the x800xl 's drop and was skeptical cuz they're just refurbs reboxed. then i got a used x800xt and it blew my 6600gt out of the water in 3dmark 05, not so much in hitman Blood money tho.. 8O. It's not much of an overclocker either..550/550. sucky..

Well, the GPU isn't the only thing that 3DMark measures... the score is a composite of both the CPU and GPU. I'm guessing your processor is better than his.

That's a pretty good score, much better than my old PowerColor X800GTO which got a 4500. But those cards on ATI's store seem overpriced to me... how much did you pay for your X800XL?