Related Articles

Overclocking

Seeing as this card was designed to be overclocked, it comes as no suprise that we were able to top out at 170 (!) MHz over the base spec. This is 100 MHz over the overclock that Powercolor ships the card with. This is extremely impressive and anyone who either owns or ends up owning this card should at least consider using its high performance potential.

We got the core on our card up from 400 MHz all the way to 570 MHz. The performance gains from such an overclock are definitely noticeable, and as you can see from our results, boost the X800 GT to very nice levels.

In 3DMark 05, the card when overclocked scored 94 frames in the Pixel Shader test. This still falls below the 6600 GT at stock speeds, but it's up almost 20 frames from the score the Radeon received at the speeds Powercolor shipped the card at.

In Doom 3, at 1024 x 768 with full filtering, the card received a boost of about 5 frames which seems paltry, but then again Doom 3 does not give good performance for Radeon cards.

Call of Duty 2 with filtering on at 1024 was bordering much closer to playable with the higher speeds, but there will have been a full months of optimisation between the demo and the retail game.

Conclusion

While originally thought to just be a stop gap measure before ATI rolled out its new midrange in the X1600 XT, as the benchmarks show, the X800 GT is able to hold its own quite well against its newer cousin. This is more in part to the disappointing performance of the X1600 XT, but this also means that in this price range, there isn't going to be a much faster replacement coming for at least 6 months or so.

Good news for prospective owners of this card.

The X800 GT in most cases beats Nvidias 6600 GT and with the extra performance that's available through its fantastic overclocking, the X800 GT is able to step out of range of the Nvidia card quite easily. The card presents highly playable framerates in most games and should satisfy the needs of most mainstream users.

Anyone in the market right now for a fast card that is able to handle the latest round of games quite well should definitely look towards the X800 GT.