ATI Radeon 9800se contrasted, compared

HERE'S THE THIRD in our series of reviews of reviews. Once more we'd like to thank the different web sites for their permission to use their data. And, once more, there's a file to download - this time an Excel worksheet which you can find here.

Official website ATI

Technical Information
Here

Online reviews read, analysed and condensed
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800SE
Extreme Overclocking
Digital-Daily
Digit-Life
Digit-Life

3D Prophet All-in-Wonder Radeon 9800 SE
HW Upgrade
PC Lab PL
Gibtek
Clubic
Benchmark PL
Hexus
Review Centre

Powercolor
Hartware NET
Digital-Daily

Others Tom's HWG

Supergrace 9800SE
Benchmark PL

Another Suffix game
Whatever ATI does, NVIDIA cannot help but mimic and vice-versa. Like a reflection in a mirror, they have learnt to behave similarly, from making the same mistakes and releasing products almost together (like the forthcoming R420 and NV40). The Suffix game is only one of the many things they have in common. Suffixes like SE or LX have nothing wrong in themselves if they are well documented and are introduced with a clear logical reasoning. But in the past years, these have made life of poor buyers more and more difficult. The "SE" suffix ATI Radeon 9800SE is one of these. As you might guess, the website of ATI does not seem to have any documentation related to it. The 9800SE appear to be "carta incognita". The same goes for website reviews. Only a handful of hardware websites did review the Radeon 9800SE, and mostly from two manufacturers.

Now if that was not enough, there seems to be THREE versions of that card as reported by Digit-Life some time back. So how are they different and how in the world are you going to be sure what you are purchasing! As you know, this card is geared towards gamers… Actually, someone along the chain liked them to gamble as well. The good news is that these cards are damn cheap and might even be soft-modded to ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. The bad news is that not all will achieve this status and will leave you with a very bad taste in the mouth. If the memory chips are in an "L" shape, then you are lucky to have a 256bit lite version of the "moddable" Radeon 9800. Else you are the "unfortunate" owner of a Radeon 9500 Pro with a R350 core instead of the usual R300.

Digital-Daily suggests that like the Athlon64 3000+ with 512Kb cache instead of a full 1MB, ATI might have handle a bunch of supposedly partly defective Radeon 9800 GPU to its partners, some of which have installed it on a Radeon 9700 board (with a 256-bit interface) while others have chosen the Radeon 9500 board (which is also sometimes used for the 9600XT), which is cheaper but offers only a 128-bit memory interface. But things are not as simple as you will see later.

Specs of the 9800SE do seem vary whether either due wantedly or due to human error. For example, Sapphiretech 9800SE webpage, the most popular 9800SE manufacturer, mentions 128bit memory interface while the PDF version presents a 256bit memory interface with 4-pixel pipelines which supposedly "doubles the rendering power of other graphic processors". Similarly, while Digitlife reports its memory running at 270MHz, Sapphiretech mention 290MHz. Surely some mistakes… Like Sapphiretech, Joytech Radeon 9800SE page contains much contradictory information.

Though based on the same core as the 9800XX series (R350), the 9800SE has 4 pipelines instead of the 8 found on the 9800 plain, pro and XT. Full support for DirectX 9.0, SMARTSHADER 2.1, SMOOTHVISION 2.1, VIDEOSHADER engine and the FULLSTREAM technology complete the list of features of the 9800SE. The "official" core speed of the 9800SE as well as its memory speed is exactly the same as for the posted figures for the 9800 on ATI's website, 290MHz/325MHz, though speeds as low as 250MHz have been spotted.

Performance and overclockability
Firstly, the overclocking capacity of this card seems to be moderately interesting with reported gains of 11% for the core and 26% for the memory. Secondly, the fillrate of the 9800SE in normal mode is disastrous. 1.3 Gtexel/s is way below the Radeon 9600 Pro's 1.6Gtexel/s. As a result, the 9800SE competes most of the time with the plain Geforce FX 5600. However when modded AND overclocked, the 9800SE can achieve the performance of a fully endowed 9800Pro. Better overclockability can be achieved using the latest drivers from Omegacorner.com in lieu of ATI's Catalyst and the usual software suspects (Rivatuner and Powerstrip) and run the risk of generating visual artifacts in your games.

Finally, a word concerning the benchmarks: each website seems to be using custom time demos for various available game demos so as to prevent any driver cheating. As a result, benchmarks figures vary to a certain amount. Also please do account that all tests were done using Catalyst 3.9. Version 4.1 which is already out will allow for some more percentage to be squeezed out. As usual take everything with a pinch of salt and if possible, make up your own benchmark by using information available from the aforementioned websites.

In the marketplace
The 9800SE will remain one mystery in the history of video cards. Only some partners (Powercolor, Sapphire, Joytech, STLabs, Supergrace and Hercules) have manufactured this card. Even Powercolor which at one time produced the 256-bit version of the 9800SE seem to have discontinued the product and withdrawn it from their website altogether. As for the price, cheapest UK model is the Sapphire Lite Retail 9800SE at GBP 122.55 all inclusive while the plain 9800 version costs only 19 pounds more. In the US, the 9800SE retails for about USD 145.90 (around GBP 77).

Interestingly, Hercules and Sapphire have also released All in Wonder Pro version of the 9800SE. That particular version can be easily softmodded since it has a 256-bit L-shaped rather than a 128-bit memory interface. Some places even offer to "enhance" your AIW 9800SE before giving it to you. Not available in the US, the AIW offers so much more (RF remote control, plethora of I/O and lots of bits and pieces) for only 45 quid more, even though memory speed of later versions has decreased from 340MHz to 300MHz.

In conclusion
The 9800SE was most probably a (temporary) mistake made somewhere at ATI corporate level. The stealth with which the 9800SE came and is going can only leave us wondering whether its introduction was calculated or not. The Nvidia 5900XT has no worthy competitor for the time being and only an updated 9800SE with a 9800 core and cheaper 240MHz memory would be a potent match. However, this might not even be necessary since the Radeon 9800 Pro is slowly coming down the price ladder. At USD 209 on Pricewatch, it is only USD 30 more expensive than the 5900XT but is only some MHz away from the ultimate pinnacle, the 9800XT. Also, prices are bound to fall rapidly after the launch of next generation video cards in March.

Resources Over there , you will find

· W1zzards Catalyst 4.1 (Softmodded)
· Omega Catalyst 4.1 (Softmodded)
· Driver CD for 9800 SE AiW
· ATI Catalyst 4.1

Loads of tools for your ATI Video Card including the latest rivatuner - here.
Sapphiretech
Softmod