The Card
The Radeon X850 Pro squares up to NVIDIA's 6800GT in terms of cost. Here's a quick specification comparison of the two:
| Radeon X850 Pro | GeForce 6800GT | |
| GPU clock | 507MHz | 350MHz |
| Memory | 1040MHz | 1000MHz |
| Fragment pipes | 12 | 16 |
| Vertex units | 6 | 6 |
The 6800GT is slower clocked but has four more pipelines. Both cards have 256MiB of GDDR3 memory onboard. So far, cost and specifications put them fairly level, but we'll let the benchmarks make the verdict when it comes to performance.
If you compare the layout to when we previewed X850 Pro you'll see it's a reference affair, with the artwork on the cooling system complementing the bundle, as we'll see shortly.
Around the back we have the mounting and heat spreading brackets for the memory, all standard for an X850 Pro. You can also see the Rage Theatre chip towards the bracket of the card, giving us VIVO support.
While you'll find two DVI ports on a 6800GT, X850 Pro tends to come with one DVI port and a DSUB connection. Dual DVI is a possibility, but it's down to the AIB partner to implement it. It would have been nice to see this PowerColor card with dual DVI, but dual digital display users will be looking elsewhere, unfortunately.
A quick mention for the cooling solution too, which while reference for an X850 Pro, is quite nice in that the GPU comes into contact with copper, and the heat itself is transferred into the air through a series of thin copper fins. It's an effective, single-slot, relatively quiet solution.
