Final thoughts
There's little doubt that ATI's RADEON X850 XT graphics card provides decent performance in the high-end sector. Our benchmarks have illustrated that it performs at around the same kind of pace as a GeForce 6800 Ultra, and around 5% slower than ATI's own X850 XT Platinum Edition. Performance, then, isn't really a concern.Potential buyers looking to upgrade their present graphics cards and jump on the PCI-Express boat wouldn't do badly if choosing any one of the 6 cards that were tested in this article. There simply isn't a bad GPU amongst them. What it then boils down to is price; how much are you willing to pay for a set level of performance? Crucial's X850 XT 256MB PCIe is currently priced at £340.76 which includes delivery. That figure is too high, frankly, with other retail X850 XTs selling for £285 or so. An uncompetitive price could have been justified if Crucial had included an esoteric bundle (a la ASUS or MSI) or used custom cooling to reduce the heasink to a single-slot design. Neither of these are the case here, and the card is bereft of Platinum Edition features such as dual-DVI outputs and VIVO functionality.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Crucial's ATI RADEON X850 XT 256MB PCI-Express card; it's reference all the way. The killer is the price, and we urge Crucial to re-evaluate its pricing and market it for, say, £299 including delivery. It would be worth a shot then.
