Digital Trends

ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256MB

April 28th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Use and testing

Fast-paced, high action gaming is where this video card excels and often dominates most of the competition. It can handle all of today's current games with aggressive settings and is well-suited to handle future titles. This is where the Radeon 9800XT will become such a great buy when ATIs Radeon X800 and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 start shipping in the next few weeks.

While today's graphics-intensive games such as Far Cry certainly will benefit from the increased performance of the Radeon X800 and the GeForce 6800, the 9800XT will easily handle all but the most aggressive visual settings. In many older games, you probably won't see much of a difference between the Radeon 9800XT and the next generation cards. It's the upcoming games that we're not sure about yet. While the 9800XT can handle anything we throw at it now, when Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 comes out, they just might be too much for this card to handle at some of the highest visual and performance settings.

Over clocking this particular card was easy and we used our standard favorite utility Rage3D video card tweaker which recognized the chipset and worked very well. Default settings for the ATI RADEON 9800XT were preset and recognized at GPU core 411.75 MHz and memory was set at 364.5 MHz at start up. The driver we used was ATI's Catalyst version 3.8.