ATI Radeon 9800 XT

The ATi Radeon 9800 XT  256MB
ATi Turns Up The Heat In High End 3D Graphics

By - Dave Altavilla
September 30, 2003

When ATi released the Radeon 9800 Pro earlier this year, the Toronto, Ontario Canada design team, had been working with a strong foundation, that was built on their most successful card ever, the Radeon 9700 Pro.  The base GPU architecture that would drive several iterations of performance enthusiast, mid range and mainstream products, was paying off in spades, versus their fiercest rival, NVIDIA.  At the same time, NVIDIA was failing to execute on any meaningful competitive new design effort.  The combination of NVIDIA's technological stutter-stepping and ATi's seemingly flawless execution, provided a new product springboard unlike any other in the Canadian company's history.  When the Radeon 9800 Pro was launched in March '03, it had literally no competition, with NVIDIA's follow-up to the miserably botched GeForce FX 5800, still months away.  Even then, when NVIDIA was able to finally unleash the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, since it had to compete with ATi's second generation VPU, its impact and market splash was diminished, versus what should have been a block-buster release for the Silicon Valley rocket-ship semiconductor company.

Then of course came the controversy.  This little industry certainly does love controversy now doesn't it?  Accusations of NVIDIA's driver optimizations, targeted at specific benchmarks and the defacement of a perfectly useful benchmarking tool and company, all spun up into a quagmire of trash-talking and mud-slinging, which certainly didn't help NVIDIA win any popularity contests.  At the end of the day, all the chatter and rhetoric didn't amount to much more than surface noise.  Or did it?  ATi was riding out the storm quietly, as industry analysts and editors scrambled to find a level playing field and new methodologies for measuring performance in consumer graphics.  The simple push-button time-demo benchmark, is now beginning to fade into the sunset, as new "customized" benchmark runs are being created and new game engines with DirectX 9 effects enter the scene.  Although benchmark optimizations have been going on in the industry for quite some time, no one really understood the depth of the issues and since many benchmarks are based on actual game engines by in large, those optimizations benefited the end user experience as well.  Regardless, the game has changed forever, in PC Graphics benchmarking and although we'll spend some longer hours in the lab here, it's all for the better.

Meanwhile, this enormous diversion was exactly what ATi needed, to steal the GeForce FX 5900's thunder, and allow them the ability to ready their mid-life kicker product, that we have for your on the test bench today.  The Radeon 9800 XT is based on the "new" R360 VPU, which is basically an R350 with kicked up speeds and feeds, Emeril Lagasee style.  True to its branding, the Radeon 9800 XT doesn't bring any changes in graphics core architecture, but rather delivers just a bit more of a good thing, ever-precious clock speed.

Specifications & Features of the 256MB ATi Radeon 9800 XT Bigger, Meaner, Faster

         
CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN ENLARGED VIEW

Alright, we'll admit it too.  We try to keep over-exuberance in check around here, in an effort to remain objective. However, the first thing that came to mind, when we saw the Radeon 9800 XT, was sort of a primal simian grunt, rather than an actual thought.  Arrrgghh, arrgghh... more power!  Now there's a heat-sink and cooling setup that can bring out the monkey man (or woman) in all of us.  Folks, this thing is gorgeous.  With a spiral bladed fan that measures nearly 80mm across and an all copper sink, this card is decked out like our old 72 GTO, chromed and braided with the hood up for show in the parking lot.  Since the Radeon 9800 XT is built on the same VPU core technology, only at a revved up higher clock speed, it's no small wonder that ATi went to great lengths to develop a strong cooling solution.  After all, these new 412MHz core and 730MHz memory clocks have to stand up to rigorous quality assurance test patterns ATi's QA torture chamber, before it can be considered "retail ready"..

BACKSIDE COOLING

FUNKY BRACKET

GPU MOUNT

Back side cooling has also now been added to the design, as we have seen in recent NVIDIA products, like the NV30 and NV35.  The copper plate on this card, also has riveted posts that push up through the PCB and mate with the top side sink, where spring-loaded retention screws crank everything together.  The back side of the card also has a pressure bracket that mounts directly across the GPU.  The bracket locks into place with simple pressure fit mount over the heat sink posts that come through the PCB on either side of the VPU.  However, this clip is a bit too free-floating for our liking and could easily be popped off inadvertently in handling or installation.  We're hopeful that ATi will come up with a better retention clip design for this back side area of the board.  Regardless, the entire assembly does a great job of cooling the card under pressure. The fan is an obvious design enhancement that left us wondering why it hadn't been implemented on other graphics cards previously.  Larger fan blades push larger volumes of air across the heat sink area, without the need to increase the RPM speed. 

In addition, the Radeon 9800 XT does have the ability to throttle the fan speed higher or lower, depending on VPU core temperatures and 3D workload.  However, the noise factor is kept to a minimum and these cards are noticeably quieter than any of the current stock GeForce FX implementations we've had in the lab.

The Radeon 9600 XT Makes Its Debut And Drivers