The ATI Radeon X850 XT PE from 2004 

The X series, unironically my favourite series of GPUs. Super underrated, but got me into PC Gaming.

I must say you single handily got me into collecting old tech, and I thank you.

You forgot to mention, this is possibly the fastest graphics card that has win98 drivers available. Win98/ME versions of Catalyst 5.2, 5.9 and 6.2 drivers all support the x850xt out of the box, no modifications needed. Both agp and pcie versions. Nice for running win9x-era games at 1600x1200 with 6xAA

This got me nostalgic, still have my old AMD 64 x2 rig with a X850 XT in it, ran great back in the day. Might have to pull it out and play some old games.

In 2004 I had an 850MHz Athlon Thunderbird (Socket 462) and a Ti4200... I still have them :-).

I remember having this card, It was quite a beast and played almost all my games near max settings at either 1024x768 or 1280x1024 on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, using a 19 in CRT. Man those were some good times! Some great memories brought back cause of this video! Thank you for posting this!

I had an x600 back then, never thought i'd have a pc that could play HL2 but my dream came true

Aaaaah those times where more noise was better! I had an Ati 850, which good memories!

"The video card is not too loud if the fans are working under 10% speed" haha

I remember when X850XT PE was fighting 6800Ultra 2004 , ah good old days. Doom, FarCry, Half Life 2.

Right around this time I was rocking a Radeon 9800 too! Paired with an Athlon 64. So happy to see Painkiller here. A stake gun? Heck yeah!

I bought one of these cards not to long ago, paired with the best Athlon 64 of 2004 as well. A pretty amazing 2004 retro gaming rig

I have the radeon X800 GT on Duel boot with win 98 & xp. My 16 yr old self wished I had all then years ago.

I didn't expect that kind of build to be called retro that soon. I'm still using these sorts of computers regularly.

I remember seeying this same card in a pc magazine cover back in the early 00's, i was so amazed by how it looked. Tha turbine cooler seemed huge, was so cool back in the day since most of the cards from that period had just a tiny heatsink and fan.

Back in that day (2003) I had a Geforce FX 5600 256mb, an Athlon XP and 2GB of RAM.

I bought the X850XT at launch and it was enough to keep me in the ATI Radeon camp for a long time. I still have this GPU in it's original build and it's still alive.

I remember the XT non PE users being able to flash those cards with a PE BIOS for increased performance. Much like the RX 5700 with a RX 5700XT BIOS for increased performance. In 2004 I had P4 with a Geforce 6800 and it ran Doom3 Great.

I always come to see good old enthusiast gamer computer hardware. This is golden essence of your channel. Watchig every video like this. Thank you for sharing

Beast of card. Back in 2005 I tested same card and 1600xt and x850xt was faster in directX 9.0B games.

this video finally solved what card was in my Dell XPS from that era. THANK YOU

I'd love to see a windows 9x video with this card.

This thing ate every game thrown at it. I used to assemble these coupled with Pentium Ds for customers. I was always sad to let them go. x)

You could enjoy any computer out there but you choose to appreciate older tech and I love that. I have a lot more fun testing and benchmarking older hardware myself!

This video card made me king of the original Battlefield , and COD games... Back when ATI was king.....

I wasn't even alive in 2004. It's crazy that games back then already looked and played so familiarly. For example, Far Cry is not a _far cry_ from modern games.

1:04 gddr5? Happy New year Phils, thanks for all the amazing vídeos, greetings and best wishes from Brazil, take care and be safe .

Happy NY, Phil! Re HL2 vouchers - my ATI Radeon 9500 came with one. It were the earliest days of the Steam and initial promise was that HL2 copy would be shipped with Radeon 9xxx series on boards launch. Reality turned out that we've got vouchers instead and had to wait another year for HL2 to be released. On the bright side was the fact that they had extended serial keys on vouchers to award the entire Orange Box plus some additional stuff - which meant that people were getting a number of good games to play while waiting for HL2 to finally be released. Of course assuming that you were able to get a good bandwidth internet connection to download stuff from Steam. For me living in Moscow is was a tough thing - best case "unlimited flat rate plan" available by that time was like 256K ADSL - and even this thing was on a pricey side for the university student. I remember spending like day and a half downloading HL2 pre-release encrypted seed blobs - insanely long when you look at it from now days perspective.

Afaik the agp version went up in price after a while due to demand

Nice video about the video card that made me dream back in the days! In 2004 I had an AMD Athlon 550Mhz with a ATI Radeon 7000 64Mb (old!) I changed in 2005 for a AMD Sempron and an ATI 9600

Hi PCL 🥳🥰👋 I personally had the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition graphics card, however mine was a single slot version with a massive copper HSF combo and at the time it was an amazing card with blistering FPS at the time it was built. I loved it 🥰🥰👍🥳🥳 and for the games I played at the time it was ahead of everything (just) with performance and I can honestly say mine NEVER sounded like that despite being under load. Terrific review! Loved this episode!

Got one looking brand new, like yours there, for just $25! (on eBay USA). It will pair with an Atlhon 64 4000+ (you´ve already reviewed) on a MSI K8N Neo4 (nForce4). That will be my top single core XP system. Have a great "retro-2021"!

In this time I had an Athlon single core and a Radeon 9550. I upgraded to that from a Rage II and I upgraded from 9550 to an HD 3650. I use a Vega 56 right now, and also still have an HD 6850, 7850, RX 470, RX 560, and RX 570. I been keeping up with the Radeons for a really long time.

I had the AGP version. Great card at the time.

Well, It's is the perfect card for dual windows 98 and XP systems. Yes, overkill choice for Win98 SE but it is officially compatible and run latest Win98 games with... sufficiency ☺️

E8xxx - my most beloved CPU line. Remember OCing E8400 to 4.2 GHz. It was just marvelous how it reacted.

I had this card for a couple of years as a late kicker for aging Pentium 4 system (2.6C @ 3.5 GHz) that didn't have PCI-E. This was a great final upgrade !

2:22 That is why i have an ATi Silencer 5 on my X850XT PE :)

2004 I was an Athlon X2 and still using my Radeon 9700pro AIW on an asrock 939 dual sata 2.. I later popped a 7900GT on that board when I could put the money into it, and that was the last ATI card I had until my 5700XT this last year... I sure got a lot of mileage out of that mainboard, as I first put a single core Athlon 64 on it, and I think I used it until the bitter end and finally moved into an E8400 on an asus P45 board and recieved my brothers 8800GTS 512 handmedowns (sli)

0:44 THANK YOU PHIL! I'm always messing around with removing the bigger versions of the intel stock cooler never realizing I could use a screwdriver XD

Ahhh the shader model 2.0. Bane of my existance in early 2000s

please review the X1950 Pro, i still love that card, mine from Sapphire and a single slot version and AGP 8X! :)

My old pc was a p4 with 865m chipset motherboard (on board vga). It only have agp 4x, and this kind of cards were something of a dream back then... My family isn't wealthy, so that pc is what we can afford... It mostly for doing college papers and such, but it chugged along just fine running Dota at low for some entertainment. I'm so glad I can afford something much better now 😊

Happy new year! Snappy driver installer origin huh?, I must remember this. I have a retro xp medion PC where I can't find most drivers for... thanks for making such informative videos. I love that old medion for retro gaming that wont work in w10. Ah I miss quake 4 and doom 3.. I newer completed them. Also the sw games of that era... oh man.... those were so great.

Phil FYI most Creative cards have a EAX support addon that allows most games to use EAX on vista/7/8/10. It works surprisingly well.

Happy New Year. Let's hope this year things will get better and thank you for the video content you make.

I bought one of these for $25 only a week ago, and it works! I will be restoring it with parts from my dead XT cooler and stuff. Need to replace the sticker though :(

Remember playing Doom 3 and Half Life 2 with this gpu. Time flies

I got one of these as a present. I used it until 2006 or 7 when games needed shaders it did not support.

I really REALLY like the design of this card, thank you!

I have one of these in a box still. Had it water cooled and it did 650mhz/650mhz. Was an absolute beast.

Got a new old stock crossfire edition just sitting in the box along with the cables but anyway love these old cards because they are so different from all that is usual these days.

having had fried many myself, that vid card fan sounds rather fried lol, keep it up my friend, happy new years from canada!

Phil, this is the best New year's present ever!

Thanks for this, I have one of these sitting in a box. Was always more of an Nvidia fan back in the day myself.

Around that time I was running an Athlon XP 2800+ with a Radeon 9600 Pro. Good times! Love your videos!

I love the way old GPS look. We need more transparent shrouds and red impellers today.

I still have the AGP version of one of these cards in a box somewhere :) I was one of those people that didnt want to fork out for a new pci-e machine but was willing to pay over the odds for a new card that was being charged at quite a premium... Looking back at it now I cant see why that made much sense.

I may have to search my PC parts storage, I could swear somewhere is a X850. Didn´t had the time to dive deeper in older than ´02 graphics cards yet.

Happy new year! I used to dream for that card back in the day, it's one of my most desired ones along the HD3850 Agp. Kind of impossible to be found in my country, atleast at a sub 100$ price tag.

x1950 Pro was my favorite card in those years.

I owned an x800 (the garishly appointed TV capture card model) back in the day. Really didn't impress me much at the time. That being said, the followup x1900XT absolutely did. At the time, loved that beast of a card and kept it for quite some time (think it was replaced by a HD4850).

I love your videos, Happy new year!

😍🥰 This was used in my first pc dream build. It burned out after a couple years though

The only ATi I ever owned was an X1950XTX and wow it was LOUD (similar to this), I remember how it was in the middle of playing Oblivion 😬. Haven't really seen something from ATi/AMD since that will convince me to get one.

Happy New Years Phil! Another year of some good videos yet to come. I think it be cool to show off some high-end gaming rigs from 10, 20 and 30 years ago. 1991, 2001 and 2011.

Oh the Nostalgia , Great vid Phil :)

Radeon X800 series had Amazing SM2.0 performance, just a direct X 9.0 beast.

in 2004 I had a P3 866 on a 440BX but only a Geforce 6200.... Thank you Phil for all the content. My daughter (shes 5) and I have used your Videos and Web page too help us build a P2 400 Voodoo3 Windows 95 PC for her edutainment games and are working on a P3-s 1400 Tusl2-c ATI 9700 pro but the ATI seems to be dead... Have a 9600 pro that works so it will be that for now.

i remember upgrading an emachines with this card so i could play half life 2. first time ever upgrading a computer, and the jump from integrated graphics to this was mind blowing.

I LOVED that GPU. I noticed around the 1:03 mark you mention it as GDDR5. I had a P4 478 system, I think 768MB ram and a Radeon 9600 AIW around this time(03/04) Thanks for the video.

I had a Radeon 9250 128GB Whooo, could that baby lag :D, was my first gaming machine and I loved it to bits!

I still have my x800xt AGP version and powered by single molex connector(obviously i dont use it anymore), damn that gpu was a beast, unfortunately it had only pixel shader 2.0 instead of 3.0 which was so bad when many games started to require it because the card had enough grunt to run them but no "modern" shader version, so the result was that many 2008 or newer games just didnt launch on it.

Love these retro videos.

In 2004 I had an emachines PC with an Athlon XP 3200+, 1GB RAM and a Radeon 9250 AGP 128mb. Worked well enough to play Everquest 2. This was also the last prebuilt desktop I ever bought. I replaced it with a Gateway laptop with an x600 and that worked quite well for several years.

I had an X800 can’t remember which off hand but I know it was a budget card that I modded to the x850 xt bios or something like that if I remember right. Was right at the beginning of the upgrade cycle I had to break away from eventually. Kept getting crazy on the graphic cards prices.

@PhilsComputerLab could you look at this x850 xt pe for Windows 98 as this card is the fastest card ATI has that supported win 98.

Great video Phil! What a nice little card. At this time I think I had an athlon64 3200 754. I ran through quite a few video cards, hard to say which one I had. But I know at one point I had a gf 6800 agp from BFG, and after that I switched to a 939 cpu and got an ati x800, something like that. Good times! Thanks for the video, always.

No need to run out and buy a x850 xt pe, its already in my "retro" pc since 2006. Got the agp version though an updated my mainboard to an asrock 775 one with agp and pcie. It is a nice card, I have so many nice memories with it and it was a good successor to my radeon 9800SE.

Played Battlefield 2 so much with this card , my Pentium 4 3,6 Ghz CPU and Windows XP. Still got the PC and tested it yesterday, works perfect. 🙂

Beautiful video card but wow was that loud. Definitely a collector's item like you said and it definitely was something I liked. I love that see through shroud or whatever you would call it.

A great card Phil Thanks and Happy New Year

Happy New Year Phil& Community. Greetz from Cologne/Germany.

Nice video! Personally I think Radeons X800 and nVidia 6000 series are ideal for win98/XP dual boot systems, as were the last to support win98 (knida overkill) and could handle many games in XP era as in your video

Happy New Year! Love your Videos.

great channel , i love all this old stuff... Back in the day my first "gaming pc" was a gateway and it had a P3 and it had a TNT2 , i inspired my mate to get the same PC and he got the same gateway and he got the TNT2 "ultra" , i was so jealous. SUBBED !!

Back then I had an FX5200 sadly... CPU was a Barton Athlon XP, not sure about the exact model but one with the 400 FSB.

Wait a min... That diassembly of the pc completely threw me off xD "Noo, he is removing the CPU cooler by turning the clips, thats not how to install it"

Happy New Year Phil!

I had one of these cards but it was a better AIB unit with a different and quieter cooler on it. Last time an ATi/AMD card resided in my main PC actually but secondary PC and my kids PC's have sported Radeons since. Still have a HD3850 AGP card in spares bin but sold the X850XT PE to a friend to upgrade him back in the day. Nice retro flashback with my morning coffee today especially with the featured games as I played a lot of HL2 and Far Cry. Happy New Year!

Ah, a little journey to my youth... But i had radeon 9800 pro

X800 were epic. They could run many ps3 x360 games like tomb raider legend. Unreal tournament 3. Cod4. Ghost recon aw. Rainbow six vegas. Gears of war. Just cause. Nfs most wanted. Carbon. Undercover. And off course crysis. They were so powerfull

I see your New Year's resolution would be 1600x1200 :D Good one! All the best!

Ah, I was wondering why Q4 looks terrible on my 5600XT. Cheers, Phil

This was such a good card back in its day, I still have mine--hot and loud is how these things worked. 90+ degrees C was just how they run and the fan screams constantly.

Thank you so much for this video 👍🏻👌🏻✌🏻

I had one back then! Good card! I always was a fan of ATi back then.

Back in 2004 I may have still been struggling with an ATI Rage 3d gpu. This 850 xt PE is a really great card for a collection and I think it was one of the first dual slot gpus. Since this is the best ati gpu last compatible with win98se, albeit with beta driver, I've always been very curious to see how well this x850 xt and geforce 6800 ultra can work with 98se and what are the good and bad for it.

Happy new year Phil!

I was at sea as I was still in the US Navy at the time, and so I had a Pentium III laptop with Intel gma 950 GFX. It was decent for games that were released in the year 2000 and older.