Mobility RADEON X800 XT 256MB
2D performance, thanks to a faster CPU, has been more than adequate thus far. However, Rockdirect is now equipping all of its XTI line of laptop computers with ATI's Mobility RADEON X800 XT GPU.
The XTI 3.6, reviewed recently, shipped with a MR X800, clocked in at 400MHz core and 700MHz RAM. The extra muscle that the XT brings to the table is considerable. Core speed is now 480MHz, and the use of GDDR3 memory pushes up RAM speed to a GeForce 6800 Go Ultra-matching 1100MHz. That's not all, though, as the XT edition adds further 3D firepower by using a full desktop complement of 16 rendering pipelines. Let's summarise it in a table.
| GPU | ATI Mobility Radeon X800 XT (Rock) | ATI Mobility Radeon X800 (Rock) | GeForce 6800 Go Ultra (Dell) | GeForce 6800 GT (Desktop) |
| Interface/speed | PCI-Express | PCI-Express | PCI-Express | PCI-Express | Onboard memory | 256MB | 256MB | 256MB | 256MB | Core speed | 480MHz | 400MHz | 450MHz | 350MHz | Rendering pipelines | 16 | 12 | 12 | 16 | Fillrate (multi-texturing) | 7.68GTexels/s | 4.8GTexels/s | 5.4GTexels/s | 5.6GTexels/s | Memory interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | Memory speed | 1100MHz (GDDR3) | 700MHz (GDDR) | 1100MHz (GDDR3) | 1000MHz (GDDR3) | Memory bandwidth (max) | 35.2GB/s | 22.4GB/s | 35.2GB/s | 32GB/s | Vertex shaders | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 |
The ATI Mobility RADEON X800 XT (or X800 XT PE, as Rockdirect likes to call it) would fit in just behind a desktop RADEON X850 XT 256MB, thanks to its massive fillrate and bandwidth. Think about that again for a second or two! Coming back to the differences between it and the MR X800, it has no less than a 60% fillrate advantage and a 57% bandwidth gain. It's not just faster on paper, it's in a different league altogether.
