X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800: R420 Totally Exposed (page 2)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov , Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/04/2004 | 06:42 AM ]

Power Consumption: Good News from ATI

It is exactly due to this advanced production technology that the power consumption and heat dissipation of the new graphics solutions from ATI haven’t got any higher, according to the company. Moreover, they even claim that these parameters got lower compared with what the previous R360 based graphics cards demonstrated.

According to ATI Technologies, RADEON X800 PRO graphics adapter consumes about 50-60W on boot-up, while RADEON 9800 XT required about 65-75W for the same operations.

This way, the power consumption of the new RADEON family is much lo0wer than that of GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is a definitely pleasing fact: there is no need to look for a super-powerful and super-expensive power supply unit, because the minimal recommendation set by ATI to the power supply units is 300W, which is definitely much more democratic than the 480W PSUs recommended by NVIDIA.

It is also quite probable that at least RADEON X800 PRO will have no problems working in high-end mini-systems, such as the Shuttle cubes for instance, which are equipped with 200W PSUs. This is definitely a very pleasing piece of news for SFF system fans, who at the same time are not happy with NVIDIA’s claims for 480W power supplies for the normal operation of their GeForce FX 6800 Ultra.

Nevertheless, we believe that even though ATI’s requirements to the PSU are not that severe, you should make sure that you have a good and reliable power supply unit in your system, which ensures stable voltages and proper currents. The future owners of the new RADEON X800 PRO/XT solutions should pay due attention to the PSUs from such companies as Thermaltake, Levicom, Zalman, Delta, Antec offering solutions bstarting at 400W and up.

ATI R420: 8, 12 or 16 Pipelines?

It is very interesting that ATI at first planned to respond to NVIDIA’s new architecture with an 8-pipeline solution, as they assumed this would be enough to compete with NVIDIA. However, later they started talking about 12 pixel pipelines, and a while after that they decided to introduce 16 pixel pipelines, fearing that their strike back would not be strong enough. Well, our previous review devoted to NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra showed that this is a truly very fast graphics chip, which is much faster than the former leader, ATI RADEON 9800 XT, from many viewpoints. So no doubt that they were concerned about 8 or even 12 pixel pipelines to be enough to compete with NV40 in a fair duel.

By the way, I would like to draw your attention to the number of pixel pipelines in different R420 versions and a few things you should take not of in this respect. Some overclocking enthusiasts may have already checked out the table above and are probably looking forward to the possible ways of enabling the additional pipelines on the slower card modifications, which could be done to a few older RADEON solutions. Remember, our hints to soldering an additional resistor to the die surface, which allowed turning the four-pipeline architecture into the 8-pipeline one. Slow down, guys, your dreams may never come true, because ATI claims that there will be no way to enable the disabled pipelines any more. Time will show if this is true or not, but so far we haven’t found an evident and simple way to enable additional pipelines on the slower graphics cards modifications.

As for the physical implementation of the new graphics processors, we managed to get hold of two graphics cards based on RADEON X800: RADEON X800 XT Platinum and RADEON X800 PRO. Among the cards based on X800 chips, these two are currently the most interesting ones, because RADEON X800 SE is too limited from the functional point of view to be able to compete with GeForce 6800 and 6800 Ultra.

So, let’s take a closer look at the cards now.