Installation

With the new card in its place, I double checked that I had the power connector plugged in and fired up the PC. The fan runs at 100%, it is merely quieter than a 6800Ultra at full blast, seconds later it throttles to 36% and is much quieter. I installed a fresh copy of Windows and downloaded ATITool.

Standard clocks were exactly 500/500 (GPU/Memory). Voltage control, temperature monitoring, as well as fan control were all available.

The card idled around 45°C, with an increase to 55°C loaded.

Overclocking

I was anxious to see if the card could be unlocked. We tried several BIOSes – modifying the original BIOS and a X1800XL BIOS - sadly, with no avail. The pipeline count would not budge no matter what, so it looks like our sample was locked. Other people on the Internet have been more successful though.

Next, I tried overclocking – with standard voltages, the card reached 573 MHz on the core, 567 MHz on the memory, which is around a 15% increase for each.


I thought OK, now lets see what this card can really do. Below is a picture of the “extreme” setup I used:

What you see is a 92mm Delta (0.4A, CFM unknown), right below the X1800GTO intake, then a Arctic cooling fan 3, cooling the VREGS, and finally a 80mm Fan Case fan (0.25A) proped up to the side.

The X1800GTO fan speed was set to 100%, all other fans were run at 100% as well. I must say that this setup was about as loud as my 6800 Ultra SLI setup when gaming.

What did this achieve? First, I bumped the core voltage. Step by step, I raised it to 1.3V, which I considered safe for short term testing, a waterblock or some other type of cooling would have been beneficial for long term use. The core then went all the way to 702 MHz. That’s an overclock of 40%! Very good, considering it was done on air.

Memory overclocking was nothing spectacular on the other hand. With 2.2V through the memory, and 2.001V MVDDQ, the memory only reached 675 MHz.

According to ATITool, the card drew 34A under load. The Enermax EG701 (600W, dual rail) had no problems handling this setup.

When I ran 3DMark05 with this setup, I reached 8838 3DMarks, with my Athlon 64 3500+ running stock (2.2GHz). I am confident that with the CPU overclocked close to 3GHz, the card watercooled, it should be no problem to reach around 9000-9500 in 3DMark05, possibly more – simply amazing for a 12 pipeline card!

Test system