X800 XL = low power?

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Wed Feb 09, 2005 6:43 am

The new ATI card certainly looks good, Seems to be the only faster one made in 110 nm and doesn't even have a power connector in the standard design!! Not that I avoid the power connector, but it's good to see that it can run without. Or, can the PCIE slot give more power than an AGP?

So, have anyone seen how much power this one draws?

madman2003 · Post by **madman2003** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:21 am

A pci-express 16x slot can provide about 75 W of power, which is more than an AGP slot. (i think an agp slot can provide a little more than half what an pci-express 16x slot can provide)

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:57 am

Ok, thanks! That explains a lot, like why the 6 pin PCIE connector is so uncommon on new PSU's.
My guess is that the X800 XL draws less power than the X800 Pro since the latter runs at higher speed and is made with 130 nm process.

madman2003 · Post by **madman2003** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 6:00 am

The 6-pin connector is only present on atx 2.0 or newer psu's IIRC.
Quite a few psu's are still atx 1.3. If you buy a psu with a 24pins connector instead of a 20pins connector, then it's likely to have a 6pin pci-express connector too.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 6:11 am

madman2003 wrote:The 6-pin connector is only present on atx 2.0 or newer psu's IIRC.
Quite a few psu's are still atx 1.3. If you buy a psu with a 24pins connector instead of a 20pins connector, then it's likely to have a 6pin pci-express connector too.

Not sure about that. A good example is Seasonic S12. You have to buy the 500 or 600 W model to get the 6 pin connector. The 330, 380 and 430 W models don't have it.

madman2003 · Post by **madman2003** » Thu Feb 10, 2005 8:04 am

You were right, it doesn't seem to be required to have a 6pin connector.

halcyon · Post by **halcyon** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 2:51 am

Comparative power draw of X800XL (110nm) against X800XT (130nm) measured as total system power draw:

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r430/index.php?p=4

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:02 am

Thanks Halcyon!
Well that didn't look so good. The XT runs 100 MHz faster and consumes only 8 W more...

Smoken Joe · Post by **Smoken Joe** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:30 am

Mats wrote:Thanks Halcyon!Well that didn't look so good. The XT runs 100 MHz faster and consumes only 8 W more...

It is more than just faster the xl has more pipelines too. I would not be suprised if you could undervolt it too if you were really trying to cut down on noise. I beleve the powercolor has an extra molex for extra power letting you overclock more than the stock XL. Some of the pics also had a better cooling rig than the stock ATI card.

This will be the best card price to performance if it ever reaches retail price. I ended up getting the 6800 GT as I am impaitent it is ver quiet unless playing games with the fan adjusted to half speed. You should get a 90nm AMD to go with it my fan doesnt even need to have the fan spinng to keep it cool when undervolted and under clocked but with a few clicks it is going super fast!

70-100 FPS in far cry with everything maxed and very high resolution.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:03 am

Smoken Joe wrote:It is more than just faster the xl has more pipelines too.

I think they both have 16 pipelines, so I really can't see that the XL should be more low power.

This will be the best card price to performance if it ever reaches retail price.

???
We have had it in Sweden for a month, I thought it was late here...
Yeah the price is very good, right now it's cheaper than the old 9800 XT!!!
If I would buy a card today then I'd go for this one.

Smoken Joe · Post by **Smoken Joe** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:24 pm

I was compairing between the pro and the XL the XL has 16 the pro has 12.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2290&p=2

Right now the XL is more expensive than the 6800 GT which has more speed than the XL. the retail price is 300 here and the GT retail price is 400 though if you can live with a AGP you can get them as cheap as 300 if you really watch the sales.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 11:04 pm

Smoken Joe wrote:I was compairing between the pro and the XL the XL has 16 the pro has 12.

Ok, but then you're talking about sonething completely different, how should I know that? That's why I didn't understand what you were talking about. I was referring to halcyon's link. Both XL and XT have 16 pipelines, XT runs much faster and still there's not much difference in power consumption.

Right now the XL is more expensive than the 6800 GT which has more speed than the XL. the retail price is 300 here and the GT retail price is 400 though if you can live with a AGP you can get them as cheap as 300 if you really watch the sales.

First you say that XL is more expensive and then you say that it's 100 cheaper, I don't quite follow... And if you watch the sales for the XL too I'm sure that you can find cheaper ones.
The 6800 GT goes for 570 USD and the X800 XL for 400 USD here in Sweden, both PCIE. For me it's not interesting to compare AGP and PCIE boards since I won't have the choice when buying, I'm a single PC owner and mobos with both interfaces are very rare.

For a long time I thought that I would go on with AGP but then I saw that they scale very bad with increased CPU speed, so there's no gain with buying a faster CPU later on or to overclock. AGP looks even more like a dead end to me right now.

If you're a 9800 Pro owner like me you don't like this picture...

This is the worst one, some tests are better and thet're only done with Half Life 2. There are some bad ones with high end PCIE cards too. If anyone know something more about this, please tell me. I haven't seen so much about it yet, would like too know more to be sure.

nici · Post by **nici** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 8:10 am

Yay... We still havent got this card in Finland. Ok so one place has it, for 350€

Not that i care really, i decided to skip my S939 PCI-X update and just replace the broken A7N8X Deluxe with a A7N8X-E Deluxe. 9800pro should still get me through one year..

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 9:22 am

Mats wrote:For a long time I thought that I would go on with AGP but then I saw that they scale very bad with increased CPU speed, so there's no gain with buying a faster CPU later on or to overclock. AGP looks even more like a dead end to me right now.

I think you must be mistaken - in reviews that compared PCIe with AGP versions of the exact same chipset, running at the same speed, the difference in performance was negligible, even when using a fast processor. It's fairly widely known that current graphics cards only saw a few percent improvement using AGP 8x vs. AGP 4x, and the extra speed of PCIe 16x isn't being utilised by current graphics chipsets. That's why SLI setups that run the graphics cards over a PCIe 8x interface don't see any significant slow down because of this.

No, PCIe will come into its own when programs start offloading arbitrary* computation downstream onto the graphics card, because PCIe can send the results back upstream much faster than AGP.

*i.e., anything but graphics for output to the screen.

It'll be a couple of generations before graphics chipsets are significantly bound by AGP.

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 10:14 am

Spod wrote:
Mats wrote:For a long time I thought that I would go on with AGP but then I saw that they scale very bad with increased CPU speed, so there's no gain with buying a faster CPU later on or to overclock. AGP looks even more like a dead end to me right now.
I think you must be mistaken - in reviews that compared PCIe with AGP versions of the exact same chipset, running at the same speed, the difference in performance was negligible, even when using a fast processor. It's fairly widely known that current graphics cards only saw a few percent improvement using AGP 8x vs. AGP 4x, and the extra speed of PCIe 16x isn't being utilised by current graphics chipsets. That's why SLI setups that run the graphics cards over a PCIe 8x interface don't see any significant slow down because of this.

No, PCIe will come into its own when programs start offloading arbitrary* computation downstream onto the graphics card, because PCIe can send the results back upstream much faster than AGP.

*i.e., anything but graphics for output to the screen.

It'll be a couple of generations before graphics chipsets are significantly bound by AGP.

No mistake, blame Anandtech instead. How do you explain the link I posted? Anandtech doesn't have the best reputation but I haven't seen any similar tests. I know that AGP 4x is sufficient for almost all cases, I didn't say anything else.