ATI Radeon X850 XT Graphic Card

I ordered this ATI Radeon X850XT card as a replacement for my ageing X700pro because I wanted to play F.E.A.R. and Battlefield 2 with decent graphics settings. When the card arrived I fitted it with some difficulty into the case and turned on the computer. Nothing. Then I remembered that this card needs a power cable, so I connected that. It was around this point that I noticed that the vga cable from my monitor wouldnt connect to the card. Luckily my x700pro came with an adapter. This card was an OEM and as such came with no peripherals or software.

I was greeted by a huge roar as the fan revved up to full speed.I won't lie to you my friends; I was scared! But it soon subsided to its idle speed and wasn't very loud. In fact I didn't hear it go anywhere near as loud during any of the games I played.

After installing the drivers etc. I got on to playing the games. I saw a double in my average framerate on FEAR using my x700pro graphics settings and then managed to get the same framerates(slightly better) with all the eye candy on except soft shadows ( and only 2XAA vs 4XAA).

Playing FEAR is fun when you have all the settings maxed. So naturally I spent a few hours on that, giggling like a schoolgirl, before even thinking of BF2. When I did, I got a shock. I could play the game on max resolution and max settings! This is no mean feat for a game that has expansive maps and up to 64 players at once. It's not got the dynamic lighting of FEAR but it's certainly not a bad looking game.

I haven't had the card long but I can definately reccomend this as an upgrade from an x700 card or similar. It's a quantum leap in performance.

My computer is an AMD Athlon64 3500+ with 1gig of PC3200 Kingston value RAM and a 250Gig IDE hard drive. The motherboard is an ASRock that I picked up for £50. In short, this is not a monster of a machine, which makes fragging everyone in sight at maximum resolution on BF2 that much more satisfying.

The ATI X850 series consists of the usual suspects from ATI...the XL, Pro, XT, and XT Platinum Edition. All of the cards in the RADEON X850 series can use the CATALYST Control Center and have up to 16 pipelines for gaming performance unlike anything seen years ago. Today Legit Reviews will take a look at the Sapphire X850 XT, which happens to be the second fastest video card that ATI offers in their PCI-Express line.

With the graphics industry beginning it's migration to PCI-Express late last year, ATI's high end PCI-E X800 XT PE cards were extremely hard to find. The main reason for this was fairly simple, ATI, while trying to get the most possible out of their cards, was overly aggressive with the memory clocks on the X800 XT PE cards. By setting the memory clocks so aggressively (575MHz), ATI was unable to secure enough memory chips that met the higher clock speeds to produce an adequate number of the cards.

With more and more people jumping ship and embracing NVidia's SLI technology, ATI was forced to release a high end card to protect it's small market lead of NVidia. ATI basically kept the same design with the X850 line as their X800 line, they simply decided to make the new X850 XT and PE's more available by lowering the memory clock speeds, updating the core from the R423 that powered the X800 series, to the R480 for the X850 series, and implementing their best cooling solution yet. People hoping for a huge performance boost in the X850 over the X800 will be disappointed as the difference in performance is very small (said to be less than 10%). Curiously, while ATI's X800 XL card is built upon the .11 micron technology, the X850 line is built upon the more mature .13 micron technology.