January has certainly been a busy month for ATI – the Canadian company launched the new X1900 series of cards, which pushed graphics performance to even greater heights. The part it was replacing, the X1800 is perhaps one of the most short-lived series that ATI had ever produced – not because it was a failure, quite the opposite - but because it was horribly delayed and it’s just the price ATI has to pay for the frantic pace the graphics card industry has gotten into the past few years.
So, with a new taking the world by storm, why focus on a soon-to-be-previous generation model? The reason is simple, and it’s the reason that drives a great volume of cards in the market: the price – performance ratio. The Radeon X1800 XL is an often underappreciated but still great card, with a great feature set, and even greater performance. Its price will probably drop in coming weeks as the new cards arrive in stores, making it an even greater value – and here we are, to explore its overclocking potential, so as to see whether we can get even more value from this card.

The Card
The card we have was kindly provided by Club3D, an AIB partner that makes most of its business here in Europe. Club3D is well known for sticking with the reference design for its cards, and for having great quality and prices.

Our sample is a retail model which matches the cards you will find in the retail shops, so will be a good indication of what you can achieve should you purchase the same model. The card itself, as you can see is rather long – which was up until now unusual for ATI cards, but it has become the norm with the X1800 series of cards. It features a single slot cooler and ATI’s standard red PCB.

The bundle is relatively sparce with only the essentials supplied – however most people do not require a plethora of games, they just want to get the best card for the cheapest price, and Club3D provides exactly that.