Club3D's Radeon X800 XL AGP Board Examination
Have a good look at the photographs for a little while, just to soak up the details. Done? Alright, what can you see through the gaps in the fan on Club3D's board? PCB and surface mount components, right? And what's usually in that space directly above the AGP connector? Yeah, the GPU package! So you can see it's been moved on, under the major heatsink mass over on the right of the board, due to RIALTO.
The 400 gram board has a 221mm x 105mm PCB which might not sound like a lot in isolation, so I offer you a picture of the XL next to the AGP X850 XT Platinum Edition, and NVIDIA's largest current offering: GeForce 6800 Ultra.
Dwarfing the 182mm x 105mm X850 XT Platinum Edition, you can see RIALTO adding over an inch of length to the board, pushing it past NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra by a few millimetres. While it remains single slot, the extra PCB area for RIALTO is going to drop it off the shopping list for some small form factor PC owners, which while a somewhat small section of the market, is something to take into account.
A cute little clown girl wearing not that much, with generous funbags, adorns the cooler's branding plate. Carrying the Club3D card, she adds a bit of perv to your PC.
Like the X850 XT Platinum Edition, the high-end R430-based board carries a Rage Theater 200 for VIVO duties, with 256MB of Samsung's 500MHz-rated GC20 GDDR3 DRAM IC providing on-card memory. The same S-Video, DVI-I and VGA connector triplet let you feed the Theater and get video back out. Again, I lament the lack of dual DVI ports on a card in the sector the X800 XL occupies.
The cooler is acceptably quiet except at full speed, at which point you should be enjoying the audio from your favourite game at a volume sufficient to drown out the fan noise. That's the theory, anyway. This reviewer thinks it's an acceptable aural profile for a gamer's card, anyway.
Size and lack of a second DVI output are all that let it down, really. Getting X800 XL on AGP is maybe a fine tradeoff to make for those things, in your eyes. It's not all about the card, though, when it comes to retail hardware. There's a bundle and presentation to consider.
