Introduction

If you’ve been shopping for a RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition the past few months, you know how difficult finding one of these cards either at retail or online can be – many would call it mission impossible! In the rare case where you are able to find a retailer with X800 XT Platinum Edition cards in stock, chances are the card sells for more than MSRP; even some of the popular e-tailers with competitive pricing have been guilty of doing this.

Sapphire X800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card

The X800 XT sits with the 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT

Complicating the matter is demand. With games like DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 debuting this year, the demand for high-end cards like the X800 XT Platinum Edition is incredible. As a result, ATI has had a more difficult time with the X800 XT Platinum Edition than they’d anticipated. They just haven’t been able to match supply with market demand. Meanwhile, online rumors that the Platinum Edition has been discontinued have only drawn more attention to the problem, exacerbating ATI’s situation. Fortunately for ATI, it appears there may be light at the end of the tunnel. The solution? RADEON X800 XT AGP!

If you recall our ATI RADEON X800 XT & X600 XT PCI-E Performance Preview article, the X800 XT is largely derived from the X800 XT Platinum Edition. The X800 XT features the same 16 pixel pipeline configuration as the X800 XT Platinum Edition with a 256-bit memory interface, only it ships at slower clock speeds: 500MHz on the graphics core and 500MHz for the memory (1.0GHz effective). This compares quite similarly to the Platinum Edition, which features a 520MHz core and 560MHz memory, and also bests NVIDIA’s popular $400 GeForce 6800 GT, which boasts specs of 350MHz core/500MHz memory.

Originally there was a catch though: ATI was going to limit the X800 XT to the PCI Express interface only. The boards retailed for $450, and have been quickly adopted by ATI and its board partners.

The new high-end shootout: X800 XT AGP versus GeForce 6800 GT

Both cards ship with single slot cooling

Market demand for high-end AGP cards have changed ATI’s plans however; as ATI and its board partners are now busy cranking out AGP-based X800 XT cards. These AGP X800 XTs ship with the same feature set as their PCI Express brethren, namely a 500MHz core clock speed and 256MB of GDDR3 memory also running at 500MHz. Sapphire was the first manufacturer to get one of these cards in our hands and we were eager to see how it compared to the X800 XT Platinum Edition, as well as the GeForce 6800 GT. But before we get into that, there’s one other interesting aspect of this board’s origins that we should discuss…