X-bit labs

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra against ATI RADEON 9800 XT: Shader Wars (page 5)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 10/23/2003 | 03:31 PM ]

ATI RADEON 9800 XT

The ATI RADEON 9800 XT graphics processor will be represented by the reference graphics card form ATI:

The PCB design of the new solution is pretty different from what ATI RADEON 9800 PRO used to have. The graphics chip and memory voltage regulator circuitry seems to have undergone the biggest changes.

The front side of the PCB is equipped with a new copper heatsink with a huge fan. On the reverse side of the card PCB the memory chips are covered with a copper heatsink plate for better heat take off.

Just like ATI RADEON 9800 PRO, the new card features DVI-I, D-Sub and TV-Out, and requires additional power supply. However, unlike NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, the ATI graphics card still occupies only one slot on the mainboard:

The cooling solution on ATI RADEON 9800 XT is a very quiet one, not any louder than a standard cooler of a RADEON 9800 PRO based graphics card.

The card is built on ATI RADEON 9800 XT graphics processor working at 412MHz core frequency:

The card feature 256MB of onboard DDR SDRAM graphics memory in Hynix chip with 2.5ns cycle time:

The graphics memory works at 730MHz (365MHz DDR).

The graphics card based on ATI RADEON 9800 XT boasts about 8.4% faster graphics core than the predecessor, and about 7.3% faster graphics memory, that is why we do not expect RADEON 9800 XT to be too far ahead of the RADEON 9800 PRO, to tell the truth.

Or maybe we should? ATI suggests that you should increase the performance of your RADEON 9800 XT with a few dynamic overclocking tricks. Let’s find out what they are!