As we all know, after the numerous promises and long delays, ATI finally managed to respond to the NVIDIA's 7800GTX top performer with its x1800 graphics series . Last week we've previewed the x1800XL that yields about 7000-7500 3dMark05 points on its own. It is here, it overclocks quite well and it deserves our respect and add to that  it is backed up by the fact that it has a programable controller that will allow ATI to increase the performance/stability with the future driver releases.

Also, we know that the crossfire motherboards are made available and luckilly we managed to play arround with 2 of these boards - DFI and Sapphire. We found that Sapphire was far more stable and overclockable than the DFI this time which leaves more to be wished from DFI based on their reputation. Anyway, the fact that these boards will allow you to have 2 ATI graphics series in tandem makes these boards a must buy not only if you are an ATI fan, even though the x1800 master cards are not available yet. The performance/stability is quite impressive for a first BIOS and boards revision and we must admit that ATI did a better job than NVIDIA in January this year when it released its SLI chipsets.

 ATI gained more kudos from us due to the fact that their x1800 PCBs allowed us to use an existing waterblock from NVIDIA's 6800/7800 series with no major efforts. We use these waterblocks in our own liquocool antarctic cooled systems and now they are available in retail too. Please find pictures below:

Both the x1800XT and x1800XL PCBs are identical and do not require any modifications if used together with the alphacool GPU blocks

Ok, so far so good then we said, but what about the x1800XT? Well, it is a well  known fact that they will be available in limted quanitites late November and their clock speeds will be 625/1500 that is 25% GPU and 50% memory more than the x1800XL. Luckily enough, we managed to get hold of one of the X1800XTs for a short period of time and had a go at the both - benchmarking and overclocking. :)
Again, so far so good, taking into consideration that ATI is still to release a public stable version of its drivers for these graphics. With unclocked CPU/GPU/Memory it scored 8836 3dMark05 points, thats over 1000 more than the Nvidia's 7800GTX at the launch date. Unfortunatelly we can not show you the link of these results, as 3dmark05 is recognising the x1800 graphics as generic VGA, cant determine the clock or memory speeds and doesn't allow us to make the results public.
We weren't much bothered by this so the next step in our experiment was of course overclocking. Inittially we must confess that the stock cooler was quite noisy for our tastes and it didnt keep the board cool. The ATI control panel was showing temperature at 90C which is bit over what we are used to. So before we proceeded to overclock, we installed our waterblock connected with the 1/2" ID tubes. The result was outstanding - internal GPU temperature drop from 90C to 60C! And then the fun started - the ATI tool allowed us to overclock upto 698 the GPU and 1584 the GDDR (maximum available was 700/1600.)
The result was 9428 points in 3dMark05! for a single card that yet has to have a new driver released before it will go in retail, that we must admit was really good. Please see below a screenshot of the futuremark page as the results can not be published :as we mentioned:

As we can see, it does much better than a single overclocked 7800GTX even when running on a slower core CPU - ie overclocked amd x2 4800. Ok, we said again, but what is the limit? Externally the board temperature arround the GPU didn't go over the 40C, while the GPU was around 60-65C. So then, we used a different overclocking utility and decided to see the limit :) increased to 710 - stable, 720 - stable, 725 - stable. wow - that was insane! 725Mhz for the GPU! I remember a few years back having a CPU at that speed that was considered top performance. It is a shame that we didnt have more time to find the exact limit, but we know for sure that at 750 it just restarted the PC :(

Here is a final picture of the PC that we used for benchmarking/overclocking:

Now it is the time for you to choose the winner in the battle of the giants...