In ATI's ultimate wisdom, the Mac Edition of the Radeon X800 XT has a core clock speed of 475MHz, vs. 500MHz on the PC side. Not sure why it was done this way... could be thermal issues in the G5, an attempt to keep costs down for a lower volume card, or ATI could simply be giving the Mac version of the card the chips that were rejected from the PC card's 500MHz testing. Whatever the reason, I've been running my X800 XT at 500MHz for a little while now with no ill effects.
Its "overclocked" to 500MHz core speed via the ATIcellerator II utility (don't have a link handy, but it can be found at all the usual locations). A nearly 3 hour session of bot & vehicle heavy UT2004 at 1600x1200 with 4xFSAA and 16xAF produced no image artifacts, no increased fan speed and no crashing at all. Shorter gaming sessions had the same results. While YMMV, at least some X800 XT Mac Edition cards seem to be up to the task of PC-equivalent clock speeds.
Can I
see the difference between 475MHz and 500MHz on the GPU? Probably not, but that's not the point now, is it?
This has been a public service message...
Top
