X800 Kicks
I occasionally get testimonials from happy customers about products we’ve sold them. This always puts a big old grin on my face. This one is interesting because the product is the new ATI X800XT-based graphics card from MSI. This is an expensive gaming card — $750 — and we don’t sell all that many of this calibre. The report is also interesting because it is from someone who works in the information industry and he was able to give a good description of his efforts to get it working in his system. That rig, I believe, is a Pentium 4E 3.0GHz with 1GB of RAM.
So why would anyone pay that much money for a graphics card? You can sum it up like this: there are those who game, and there are those who game well.
——snip——-
Hey Bob,
Here’s some tidbits….
Ok, so I got the X800 installed, it also gets hot, really hot, it sits around 74 degrees at its max temp (that I’ve pushed it to)… now the fan is dynamic, and only spins at 69% max speed even at 70 degrees (there is a percentage formula based on the current temperature that spins up the fan — amusingly it only reaches the highest speed at the hottest temp.. 100 deg celc – as far as I can tell.) Using an ATITool I changed this behavior – the fan now spins at 100% continually, and the max temperature I’ve seen drops 10 Degrees.
Power Draw: it’s mean, it’s lean, it’s a power consuming machine… my UPS blew it’s circuit and shorted 2 x while under stress test, effectively powering down my PC. Here’s why: the R9700P would occasionally trigger my UPS in to thinking there was a power issue.. causing it to squawk… I never understood that it was having problems with power draw from the PC, not the power intake from the wall.
Being on the edge of the power draw from the UPS may have caused my other issues I had – file and partition corruption etc… the X800 showed me exactly how close it was. Putting my monitor on a new circuit remedied the issue, btw. The 350 w supply in my PC seems strong enough for the X800.
Game Performance:
Unbelievable. It runs awesome, everything can be run at 6x aa and 16x af, Halo still chugs along — not due to the card, if I unlock the 30fps from the game, it actually overworks the CPU…
Camelot 1152×864 – 6x aa, 16x af – 2 accounts, performance is Stellar.
Doom 3 – 1024×768 (high quality) – any settings — works awesome, no noticeable performance problems at all.
Freelancer – 1152×864 – 6x aa, 16x af, no problems.
Jedi Academy – 1152×864 – 6x aa, 16x af (selected in game) – No issues, smooth ish at about 50 fps (considering ATI has a problem using Dynamic Glow in that game — heh, it’s stellar — using dynamic glow off doubles performance)
Knights of the Old Republic – untested.
Thief 3 – any settings, usually no aa or af due to the game engine, works awesome.
X800 3dmark 03 – 12000 + marks – unoptimized
Compared to – R9700p 5060 marks. Tweaked for performance heh.
Same CPU and all.
