If you’re in the market for a high-end PCIE card, your options are ATI, or... ATI. Although NVIDIA has officially launched the 6800 series of PCIE cards, you would be extremely hard pressed to actually find one available for purchase. In fact, we did some looking around and were not able to find a single add-in-board partner that manufactures a 6800 PCIE card of any flavor. The only 6800 PCIE cards that anyone has been able to get a hold of have been NVIDIA reference boards, which as you may have guessed, are not available for purchase.

Today we will be taking a look at the Radeon X800 XT from ATI. The main differences that seperate the X800 XT from the X800 Pro are the clock speeds and pipelines. The X800 XT has 16 pixel pipelines and operates at 520 MHz core and 560 MHz (1120 GHz DDR) memory speeds while the X800 Pro has 12 pixel pipelines and operates at 475 MHz core and 450 MHz (900 MHz DDR) memory speeds. At present, the X800 XT is pretty much the best PCIE card on the market, as the X800 XT PE is hard to find, and the 6800s are nonexistent. So what sort of performance can you expect to get from the best money can buy? Well, I’m glad you asked, because that is just what we intend to find out!