The Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition 256 MB card is ATi’s top-of-the-line card. Based around the R480 GPU, it uses 130nm manufacturing process to obtain higher clock speeds. This is probably the first ATi card to employ a two-slot cooling system. The leaf blower fans, first seen on the nVidia cards, do a good job on the Radeon as well. We tested the card on the Intel D925XCV motherboard with 1 GB of DDR II 533 MHz memory, 250 GB Maxtor and Windows XP and the latest updates and patches. We used the latest 4.12 catalyst drivers. The card, as expected, performed superbly posting some of the best scores we have ever
seen. In 3D Mark05, the X850XT PE logged an amazing 5540, the best ever by any card. Below a resolution of 1600x1200, the card becomes CPU-bound and a lot depends on your CPU speed. To avoid this, we ran our benchmarks at a resolution of 1600x1200. We ran Doom3, Half- Life 2, Far Cry and Halo benchmarks and the card came through with flying colours on all counts. One point to note here is that Doom3 prefers nVidia cards and hence, cards based on 6800 Ultra do better than ATi ones, however, the reverse is true for ATi when it comes to Half-Life 2. Which brings us to the million dollar question: Which card should you buy? That would depend on which game engine developers prefer—Doom3 or Half-Life 2. Enough of benchmarking, we also put the card to a real world test and played all these and many more games with pumped up effects. The games play was smooth, effects awesome and not once did the fan blower raise its decibel to exert grievances! But as with all high-end cards, availability may be an issue.
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