Radeon X1800 XT, formerly known as R520, is the new high-end chip from ATI, directly competing with GeForce 7800 GTX from nVidia. We’ve got a reference sample for this model from ATI, so we will compare its performance to other members of the Radeon X1000 series, to previous ATI chips and also with competing products from nVidia. But don’t get too excited: video cards based on Radeon X1800 XT will only reach the market in one month from now.

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Figure 1: Radeon X1800 XT reference board.

We’ve posted a complete article explaining what’s new on Radeon X1000 series, so we won’t be repeating here everything we have already explained there. The big news is that all chips from this series are finally supporting Shader 3.0 model (DirectX 9.0c).

There are two chips on Radeon X1800 family: X1800 XT and X1800 XL. X1800 XT runs at 625 MHz and accesses its memory at 1.5 GHz (48 GB/s). As we mentioned, it will reach the market only on November 05th, 2005 at a suggested price of USD 499 for the 256 MB version and USD 549 for the 512 MB version. We reviewed the 512 MB reference model. X1800 XL runs at 500 MHz, accesses its memory at 1 GHz (32 GB/s) and according to ATI should arrive at the market today, at a suggested price of USD 449.

You can see in our tutorial “ATI Chips Comparison table” the difference between this new chip and the other chips from ATI, while on our tutorial “nVidia Chips Comparison Table” you can compare it to its competitors from nVidia.

You can see the Radeon X1800 XT reference board on Figures 2 and 3.

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Figure 2: ATI Radeon X1800 XT reference board.

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Figure 3: ATI Radeon X1800 XT reference board, back view.

Let’s now take a closer look on the Radeon X1800 XT reference board from ATI.