Despite a totally new PCB and a tweaked chip, architecturally speaking the 9800 XT's R360 is no different from the 9800 Pros R350, which is itself only a relatively minor departure from the 9700 Pro's original R300. If you are hankering after some techy speak, check out our 9800 Pro and 9700 Pro reviews here and here respectively. The Radeon 9800 XT does however have rearrangement of some transistors and optimised pathways which allow it to run stably at its stock speed. An important new feature of the Radeon 9800XT is the addition of an on-package thermal diode. This in itself is nothing spectacular, some other graphics cards have had such a feature for a long time, but the R360 is different in that it has the ability to directly interface with the now famed catalyst drivers. What does this mean? Automatic overclocking - but most importantly - ATi sanctioned overclocking!
ATi OverDrive
As you can see from the screenshot above, ATi are not just playing with us, manufacturer endorsed overclocking is here right now. :) We will take a look at how much of a difference ATi overdrive makes in the benchmarking section, but according to unofficial sources the increase seems to be more in the area of a few percent rather than anything particularly significant. One thing is for sure though, ATi is certainly feeling bold at the moment and so it should with nVIDIA having had to pay catch up for an increasingly worryingly long time - they have not held the crown of fastest card maker since the GeForce Ti-4600 all that time ago.
