The Hardware Hall of Fame

ATI Radeon X850XT PE

Launched Winter 2004
Inducted for Getting a deserved nickname

Nvidia had a return to form with the GeForce 6-series, and caught ATI off-guard. The red team’s Radeon X800 was a souped-up Radeon 9800 Pro, which in turn was a souped-up Radeon 9700 Pro. ATI’s next architecture was a long way off, so its only option was to soup up the card again – and frankly, there’s only so much soup you can take before you want something more solid. Enter the X850 XT PE, clocked at 540MHz, easily outpacing Nvidia’s 425MHz GeForce 6800 Ultra. Its 256MB of GDDR3 memory was the fastest ever seen too, running at a stunning 587MHz – effectively 1.17GHz, giving the X850 XT PE a massive (for the day) 37.4GB per second of memory bandwidth.

Needless to say, it ran very hot, but it was quiet, and it also succeeded in outpacing the GeForce 6800 Ultra. We gave it an award, and the public were eager to get their hands on it . However, ATI struggled to make the card – not just to make it in significant volumes, but even to actually produce it in the small numbers that the ultra high-end graphics card market demands. The name-calling started, and while bullies can be cruel, they can occasionally be brutally accurate, which was the case here.

The X850 XT PE’s name was changed from ‘Platinum Edition’ to ‘Press Edition’, since only members of the media ever saw the card in real life. It’s a jibe still recalled by veteran ATI PR people, and probably the reason that the next time ATI wanted a name for a super high-end card, it opted for a jumble of Xs and Ts (the ludicrously named Radeon X1950 XTX).

Who's next?

That concludes our original nominees for both the Hall of Fame and the Hut of FAIL. We'd like to make this a feature we can revisit though, so we're keen to hear from you - which pieces of hardware do you think we overlooked? Which components stick in your mind as offering great design and features? Which were ahead of their time and set the tempo for what was to come?

Equally, we're also interested in expanding the number of occupants of the Hut of FAIL. What do you think stands out as a truly terrible product? What's been so outrageously bad that you literally can't believe it? We're looking for products that go well beyond being dead on arrival - after all, reliability is a perennial issue for computers - we want to find the designs that really do deserve a public dressing down.

Let us know your thoughts - suggestions and reasons - in the comments, and when we're back in the New Year we'll put the best ideas to a vote!