Overclocking Buyer's Guide - September 2004

PCI Express Video

PCIe Overclocking Recommendation: ATI X800 XT Platinum 256MB PCIe
Price: $531

After several months of very limited supplies, the ATI X800 XT with PCI Express bus is finally becoming a bit easier to find. If you are an overclocker looking for top performance on a new Intel 925X board, the X800 XT is the best option at the present. Unfortunately, the ATI X800 PRO is 12 pipelines instead of 16, so more than just overclocking the video card is required to reach X800 XT performance levels. If you're set on a new Intel 775 system for overclocking, then you need to get in line to buy this card.

There are X600 XT PCIe cards available from several vendors and they would be a good alternative if your overclocking goal is to reach the highest speed possible with a 775 platform. We are finding the ATI PCIe cards to be more tolerant of out-of-spec PCIe settings on the 775, so the X600 XT should allow you to reach the highest overclocks possible in the new PCIe systems. However, you will need the X800 XT if your goal is to achieve the highest overclocks combined with top video performance at those rarified overclocks above 250 to 260 clock frequency.

As we have pointed out in the past, you can choose either the X800 XT or the 6800 Ultra and be perfectly happy and perfectly competitive in the performance area, but for overclocking PCI Express, we have found that the ATI cards simply survive to higher PCIe overclock levels.

Listed below is part of our RealTime pricing engine, which lists the lowest prices available on ATI video cards from many different reputable vendors:



If you cannot find the lowest prices on the products that we've recommended on this page, it's because we don't list some of them in our RealTime pricing engine. Until we do, we suggest that you do an independent search online at the various vendors' web sites. Just pick and choose where you want to buy your products by looking for a vendor located under the "Vendor" heading.