We have reviewed quite a few X800 series cards in the past and compared them to the equivalent Nvidia products so as you will already be aware of the relevant hardware performance of an X800XT series card we will be giving you some real world figures for this card with many of the top games, both past and present - an out of the box experience. I will also not be giving a dedicated page for overclocking at the end of this review as I want to detail performance figures in a fully overclocked state as well as reference clocks throughout the whole game test review.

So to get overclocking out of the way now, I can tell you that the maximum stable and error free clocks achievable with this card were 550 core and 570/1140 ram, faster than a higher priced stock Platinum Edition. Be aware of course that overclocking varies from card to card so it is possible if you bought this card your figures will be different. Nonetheless as they are using 1200mhz rated Samsung k4j55323qf-gc16 the overclocks on the ram should generally fall within the 550-600 zone.

Test System:

Intel P4 3.4ghz Extreme Edition (courtesy of Intel)
1 gigabyte of Corsair 3200 DDR (Courtesy of Corsair)
Abit IC7 MAX3 motherboard (Courtesy of ABIT)
2 x 36 gig Western Digital Raptor's Striped Raid.
Visiontek X800XT 500/500 and overclocked 550/570
OCZ Powerstream 470w Power Supply (courtesy of OCZ)
Dell 2001FP 20 inch TFT Monitor

While its a good assumption that most people wont be able to afford an extreme edition processor it is important when reviewing a fast video card to keep CPU bottlenecks to a minimum otherwise performance figures are tainted. All testing was recorded via FRAPS 2.3.3 in conjunction with custom built time demos as to replicate real world gaming conditions rather than a totally synthetic environment. A clean Windows XP operating system was installed and updated to SP2. While its not Driverheavens common practise to use beta drivers in reviews, for performance reasons we used the newest offical "beta" 4.12 drivers which most ATI gamers will have already installed. If you are having problems either finding or using the 4.12 drivers, download information as well as user discussion with ATI staff is available in our forum here.

Select 1. Xtasy X800XT 2. Test System 3. Serious Sam 2 4. Call of Duty 5. Return to Castle Wolfenstein 6. Farcry 7. Doom 3 8. Half Life 2 9. UT2003 Flyby 10. UT2004 Rankin 11. Conclusion