InsaneTek

ATI's battle plans have always been quite inconsistent throughout the years.  With the release of the 9700 series, they completely dominated Nvidia at that time and did so quite quietly.  The big fuss a few weeks earlier was the continuous delays of their R520 and the poor paper launches.  While loud and clear about their new R520 chipset, they were quietly working on something else in the background--pushing for a more affordable midrange video card for gamers.  Since it was aimed for budget enthusiasts, no one really looked forward to seeing what they had to show.

PowerColor is no new player in the video card industry.  Although they only provide ATI solutions, they are very popular in the enthusiast crowd.  They are known to release cards that often come with better components than ATI's specifications, i.e., faster memory, better cooling, etc.  Their current new releases are the new ATI midrange video cards--Radeon X800 GT/GTO.  PowerColor has provided various solutions under the GT/GTO line, one of which consists of using watercooling for the GPU alone.  It certainly sounds promising, but can this so-called midrange card hang with Nvidia's current midrange champ?

PowerColor Radeon X800 GT

One of the main reasons behind a video card purchase is the bundled software.  If you can get card A for the same price as card B and get a better bundle, there are very few reasons why you should not go with card A.  Fortunately, PowerColor previous bundles has been pretty decent.  The X800 GT came with a full game of Pacific Fighters, an airplane game.  I am not too big on flight simulators, but it does look interesting enough to try out and spend a few hours on.  Also found in the box are the other usual accessories like the drivers CD, CyberLink DVD software, user's manual, video cables, and a DVI-to-analog adapter.  The X800 GT comes with dual DVI connections and only a single adapter is included.  This means that running dual CRTs is going to be out of the question, that is if you don't have a second adapter.

Cooling used for the X800 GT is nothing to write home about.  There are no heatpipes, no special cooling ducts, and no copper.  The heatsink is all aluminum and only makes contact with the GPU.  The disappointing part about the cooler is that it does not make contact with the memory chips, although it is large enough to hover over it.  The good news is that PowerColor did not resort to use cheap inefficient thermal tape as the TIM between the GPU and the heatsink; gray thermal paste was used.  The stock cooler on the X800 GT ran fairly quietly throughout all tests, even at overclocked speeds.

What a surprise!  The X800 GT is powered by the powerful R480 core.  For those of you who do not understand or haven't done all your homework on GPU chipsets, the R480 is the core used to power the previous generation flagship X850 series.  The 256MB DDR3 video memory is powered by Samsung's 2.0ns memory ICs.  Theoretically, the memory is capable of running a speed of 500MHz.  And with a slightly lower rating of 490MHz by PowerColor, the video card at least has a little overclocking headroom for the memory. 

Radeon X800 GT GPU (R480 Core)

Unfortunately, the sample I received was not the one with the special watercooling.  The X800 GT I have here today is the least impressive of the pack.  PowerColor currently has four cards in their GT/GTO class.

Many of you might question why ATI would use a high class core for a midrange video card.  The reason is that not all the cores they produce are capable of running the specifications set by their model.  A core may come out with a couple of bad pipelines and that forces the downgrade.  Instead of trashing the piece of silicon, they disable the bad pipelines, run the core a little slower, and release it as a mainstream product.

One great thing about the use of the R480 core is that it allows a possibility to mod the card to a full 16 pipelines.  While the card comes with half the pipelines crippled, it does not necessarily mean that all pipelines are bad.  They might have failed ATI's stringent testing method, but are still fully operational, if you can relate to what I mean.  Many enthusiasts have found that Sapphire's X800 GTO2 is fully capable of enabling all 16 pipelines and overclock to the X850XT PE speeds.  That basically means you get an X850XT PE for a much lower cost.  From the get go, I knew that the PowerColor X800 GT would not mod so easily.  If you notice, there is no PCI-E power connector!  The R480 core is made on a 0.13 micron die, which means that it draws more power than what the PCI-E x16 slot can provide.  Without the additional power, the video card will be far from stable without any voltage modifications.  I attempted to enable an additional 4 pipelines, bringing the card to a total of 12 pipelines.  I used various BIOSes and they have all failed.  I did finally get one Sapphire BIOS to flash, but the ATI drivers would refuse to install and recognize the card.  Perhaps you'll have more luck than I did.

UPDATE:

I just received word from a fellow enthusiast friend that only the GTO2 cards are capable of flashing to X850XT PE.  This eliminates all the GTs and GTOs out there.  What a shame isn't it?

Test Setup and Overclocking

Overclocking:

I proceeded to use the popular ATITool utility to find my core and memory headroom.  The first step was to find the maximum core frequency alone.  Leaving the memory at default speeds, the core pumped to a beautiful 571.50MHz.  That is almost 100MHz from the default speed!  This is all with stock cooling too!  For the next step, I defaulted the core clock back to stock speeds and proceeded to find the highest memory clock.  With no heatsinks attached and no aid in cooling, the memory went from the default 490MHz to a spectacular 615MHz.  If you can recall earlier about the use of the 2.0ns memory chips, they are theoretically rated to run at 500MHz.  The memory overclock result came to be 115MHz over the theoretical limit and 125MHz over the default speed.  Quite amazing.  The reason why I overclocked the core and memory separately is because the end result of them both overclocked at the same time is not the same as combining the individual results.  After spending some time fiddling with frequencies and testing for stability in 3DMark05, the final overclock on stock cooling came out to be 570MHz/609MHz.  Very impressive.

Testing Setup and Methods:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice (9 x 310HTT = 2.79GHz)
• DFI NF4 SLI Infinity
• 2 x 1GB OCZ Platinum PC4000 EB (310HTT w/ 166 divider = ~254MHz 2.5-3-2-6)
• SilverStone ST60F
• Cooler Master Hyper 6+
• Windows XP Pro w/ SP2 and DirectX 9.0c
• Nvidia nForce4 AMD 6.70
• Nvidia ForceWare 81.85
• ATI Catalyst 5.10

Benchmarks:

• Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (OpenGL)
• Doom 3 (OpenGL)
• Far Cry (DirectX)
• Unreal Tournament 2004 (DirectX)
• Quake 3 (OpenGL)
• 3DMark03 (DirectX)
• 3DMark05 (DirectX)

Video Cards Tested:

• ATI Radeon X800XT
• ATI Radeon X800XL
• PowerColor Radeon X800 GT
• Gigabyte 6600 GT