VisionTek Xtasy RADEON X800 Pro

Let me step back a bit in time. Do you remember the days when the Rendition V1000 and the Voodoo1 came out? The excitement over the new possibilities? Then we got the Rendition V2200 and the Voodoo 2, and the speed was doubled, and everything looked so good. But what happened then? We got new generations of cards, but the speed increase never blew us away the same way as in the beginning. Why do I bring that up? Well, it is time to get excited again. With the X800 chipset, ATI has brought us a new generation of cards that truly blows away the previous generation in performance.

While we still are waiting for retail x800 XT cards (read our preview of the X800 XT for some performance figures), the first retail boards of its 'little brother,' the X800 Pro are turning up. Today, we are taking a look at the VisionTek Xtasy RADEON X800 Pro.

Before we start reviewing the board, let us talk a bit about VisionTek. VisionTek has been around a long time. While they used to release NVIDIA-based boards, they now exclusively make ATI-based boards. We asked them to tell us a bit about themselves, and this is what we got:

VisionTek is a division of Hartford Computer Group, Inc., founded in 1978. The VisionTek and XTASY brands gained increasing popularity from the time of their launch in 2001. The award winning Xtasy brand of products is available at Circuit City, CompUSA, Fry's, Microcenter, and others. A Premium Retail Partner for ATI in North America, VisionTek is committed to bringing the most innovative and best performing products to PC enthusiasts.

As I said earlier the X800 Pro is the 'little brother' of the X800 XT. Instead of 16 pixel pipelines, it 'only' has 12. This still is 4 more than the Radeon 9800 XT, which has 8. Let's take a closer look at the differences and similarities between the chips:

In an internal memo, NVIDIA called the X800 chips '9800 XT on steroids.' That comment is actually pretty close to the truth. In contrast to the new NVIDIA chipset, the X800 doesn't include that much innovation and new features. The main new features are Temporal AA and a new compression technique for normalmaps called 3dc. Both are described in more detail in our preview. Does the lack of new features like support of Pixel Shader 3.0 hurt the X800? I don't know. It really depends on how widely used PS3.0 will be in upcoming games as well as the benefit from using PS3.0 shaders compared to PS2.0 shaders. Usually it takes some time before the use of a newer Pixelshader version gets common in new games, but we've already heard about a patch for Far Cry as well as some upcoming games that will have some PS3.0 support. In the end though, I wouldn't turn these cards down for this reason.

Being a 9800 XT on steroids isn't bad at all. If there is something we never get enough of, it is pure pixel-pumping power. The X800 has 73% higher Pixel and Texel fillrate compared to the 9800 XT and 23% higher memory bandwidth.

Talking about power, the X800 actually draws less power than the Radeon 9800 XT. This together with being a single-slot solution makes it an ideal card for smaller systems, such as SFF systems.

Enough talk now about the X800 chip. Let us take a look at the card in our hands, the VisionTek Xtasy RADEON X800 Pro. The card is identical to the reference design. This means that it features the standard fan solution from ATI.

The memory chips do not have any heatsinks on them and are cooled by the air from the fan.

The card is of course a single-slot solution. Unfortunately we do not have a NVIDIA 6800 card yet to compare with, but here is a comparison between it and a NVIDIA FX5950U.

The X800 Pro is as short as a 9800 XT and much shorter than an NVIDIA 5950U.

The box actually is much cleaner than we are used to when it comes to boxes for video cards, especially from VisionTek. No Ruby in sight though.

A clean, almost a bit boring box.

The bundle from VisionTek is a standard generic bundle with power cable splitter, video out cables, DVI adapter and driver CD. The CD that came with the board for testing is not the final CD that will ship from VisionTek and may include some more software than the standard ATI CD we got.

The bundle includes all you need. Note the excellent Quick Install Guide which
should help even newbies to install the card.