ATI Mobility Radeon X800 XT: More Pipes in Notebooks

Final Words

Again, for a refresher on the technology behind the Mobility Radeon X800 XT, check out our earlier review of the original M28.

This has been quite an interesting weekend for us. Here, we are testing the latest mobile graphics card from ATI, which keeps up with the fastest desktop part that they have to offer. Back when the NVIDIA Go 6800 Ultra was released at a higher clock speed than the desktop part, we were happy to see parity between desktop and mobile offerings. We have felt for quite some time that the "chicken and the egg" problem of getting more users to buy mobile hardware could be solved by taking an "if you build it, they will come" perspective. It is fitting that ATI should launch this new mobile speed demon just after the first month in history that saw mobile platforms outsell desktop computers.

The 3.8GHz Pentium 4 Alienware system with 1GB of RAM, 2 DVD players, all sorts of I/O, and the Mobility Radeon X800 XT surpasses the performance of most of our desktop test beds in many areas. As this article is typed on an IBM X31 notebook with the rain clearing up outside, the feeling that the much predicted mobile revolution is in full swing overwhelms the moment. Of course, the moment is lost when the fans spin up on the Alienware notebook and the ear plugs are just out of reach.

It is quite impressive that both ATI and NVIDIA are competing as hard in the mobile space as they are on the desktop. But the real credit needs to go to these notebook designers who can offer the graphics vendors all the power and thermal headroom that they want. We still haven't seen a truly mobility oriented graphics solution as of yet. Intel had the right idea when they ventured down the path to the Pentium M, and it's about time that the rest of the industry followed suit and designed a mobile part that offers good performance rather than retrofitting a performance part for mobility.

In the case of the Mobility Radeon X800 XT, we are quite impressed. We would love to get our hands on a platform in which we could test both the MRX800 XT and the Go6800 Ultra for a fair comparison. Unfortunately, such an itch is difficult to scratch. The few real concerns that we have are the same as what we had back at the launch of the original M28. We are very happy to see this part in Alienware's latest offering, but (like the NVIDIA counterpart) this is still a very niche product.

We'd love to see parts like this move into a tighter and tighter thermal and power space. As excellent as it is to see products like this on the market, we want to see this type of graphics power available to users who want to actually be able to lift their notebook or hear themselves think.