The ATI X800XT is the fastest currently available ATI card in the high-end market for cards. The X800XT PE is hardly available, with only a few sites on Pricewatch even listing the card, and some sites charging as much as $889 for the X800XT PE Sapphire card. The X800XT on the other hand has over 70 sale listings on Pricewatch making this available to the general public from various manufacturers.
If you want a card to play the latest games with the highest image fidelity and settings, the X800XT from ATI fits the bill as good as it gets. Half Life 2 1280x1024 6x AA 16X AF? No problem here. I finished the game under Hard mode with the X800XT and my 3800+ system with few hiccups. Want to play NFSU2 at the same settings? No problem here as well.
With the announcement of ATI's next series of cards where does the X800XT fit into it? Truthfully, the performance difference between a X800XT and the likely performance of the X850XT replacement will be minor. It's hard to recommend a card that isn't even in reviewer's hands except as an overclocked version (ATI only released X850XT PEs for reviews). The fact is the X850XT is available today on many stores and that's something that can't be said about the PE or the X850 replacements.
You can get a card based upon this chip for as low as $450 online from Sapphire, Tul, Gigabyte and other manufacturers. That is a far better price than the Asus eXtreme AX 800XT, which I recently reviewed. While that card is overclocked slightly, the price is over $100 different which makes it out of this card's league. The bottom line on the ATI X800XT is this. If you can wait a couple of months, you'll likely get a X850XT, which will be faster. But for now, the X800XT PCI Express card is the fastest video card I've tested in the majority of benchmarks. It also lets me play the games I want at maximum resolution and settings.
