TechReport: As most of you know, I rarely recommend that anyone actually purchase a $549 video card like the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, or even a $499 card like the X850 XT. That's a very high price to pay when there are better values to be had at $399 and below. However, if you want to have the fastest single graphics card available, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition is it. The X850 XT PE came out on top in the majority of our tests, and it did especially well when 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering were enabled. The most notable exception was Doom 3, where the GeForce 6800 Ultra was faster, but not by all that much. ATI's decision to use application-specific optimizations in its video drivers, as NVIDIA has done for some time now, has allowed the Radeons to close the gap in Doom 3.

Beyond3D: On the face of it, the X800 XT Platinum Edition seems like a bit of a tough sell - they've moved to double slot cooling, freezing out some small form factor users in the process, seemingly increase the retail price (although, perhaps this is just an acknowledgement that X800 XT Platinum Editions hardly hit that price when they could be found) and its one of the smallest performance increases from any refresh product released.