The performance of ATI's Radeon X800 XL is another board that fall's in the "no surprises" category, as, if you've seen one of ATI numerous (in SKU variants, but not in volume, or so it would appear so far) 16 pipe graphics boards then the performance it gives is in-line with the differences in clock speeds (although thanks to its still high memory clocks its performance doesn't fall behind the X800 XT as much as it theoretical performance difference may suggest), however this is part of the point.

We can see from the performance testing that the X800 XL also outclasses X800 PRO in the majority of cases, and it does so at a suggested retail price $50 lower! Unlike the X800 PRO, which gained some favour due to the potential of unlocking the extra 4 pipelines, the modding capability of the X800 XL will not be as great and the 110nm process may limit overclocking a little in relation to the low-k based parts as all its pipelines are already active, however the performance you can expect is already mapped out, and that's at a lower suggested price. For those users on last years hardware that is looking for something reasonably high end, but feels that $400 or greater is a little beyond the pale, then this also gives them a good option to look at, especially given that X800 XL proved to be over twice the performance of last years 9800 PRO in a number of cases.

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Source : Beyond3D