OK, I really don’t want to spoil the review of the ATI Radeon X850 XT. After all, what fun would that be! So instead I am going to look at the fact that this is one slick looking card. One thing you have to say about a most modern day ATI cards is that while they might not always stack up in the benchmarks, but they sure are pretty!

It’s been a while since our last glance towards ATI’s high-end parts, in the form of our review of GeCube’s Radeon X800 Pro. While not a massive amount has changed since that time, we do now have a couple of refresh parts from the Canadian company, taking the R420 and R423 cores on which the X800 range was based and tweaking it to leave us with two new cores - R430 and R480 respectively. Today, we’ll be looking at a board based on the latter of these two new cores - The Radeon X850 XT.

As you might expect from a refresh part, there really aren’t any massive differences to speak of when you compare R480 to its older brother - Functionally and feature set wise, the two are identical. With that in mind, I won’t be talking a great deal about the features of this core, as it can all be found in our Radeon X800 Pro review.

To put it simply, R480 is a tweaked version of the R423 core used to power the PCI Express version of ATI’s initial X800 products. These tweaks serve the purpose of reducing heat and increasing clock speeds over its predecessor and, most importantly, avoiding some of the supply constraint issues we’ve seen in the past. The Radeon X800 line-up (X800 Pro aside), has picked up a far from illustrious reputation of being near vapourware, with X800 XT parts, the Platinum Edition in particular, being all but non-existent. Indeed, early indications are good that supply of these new R480 (and R430)-based parts are plentiful, with X850 products aplenty available for purchase. Whether this trend will continue with the AGP-based variants of these boards that come to market shortly remains to be seen of course, but the situation is looking decidedly more hopeful.