Performance was simply excellent, sitting head and shoulders above the test Radeon 9800 XT in terms of raw benchmark numbers. Image quality, long an ATI forté, was subjectively excellent too.

While the price sits artificially high since it's a brand new generation of GPU and performance, even at £323 it's nearly tempting me into making a purchase of my own for my own PC. My only hesitation is with the (hopefully) imminent introduction of NVIDIA's 6800 GT variant into mass market retail. Benchmarking the 6800 GT reference board indicates greater than X800 PRO performance in a number of tests.