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Sapphire Radeon X600 XT PCI-E 256MB Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 06 October 2004 |
AMDZone has reviewed the Sapphire Radeon
X600 XT 256MB PCIe graphics card. The advanced graphics port first showed up long ago after the bottlenecks of the PCI interface were reached by the first
graphics cards to fully stress the memory bandwidth of the interface. At the time, there was a lot of hype but no real performance difference between the two
but in time the superior AGP interface eventually showed it's worth and became the only interface available for graphics cards until now with native PCI
Express for ATI graphics cards.
ATI's Radeon X600 XT is not too different from the design of their Radeon 9600 XT video card. The card its self
is more the size of a Radeon 9600 PRO and features the smaller fan of that unite.
 Sapphire Radeon X600 XT PCI-E 256MB Review
It is based off ATI's special .13 process and low-k design. 2.5ns memory modules are used for a clock rate of 740MHz and a core clock speed of 500MHz. Sapphire's take on the card gives the PCB an orange like color. Sapphire Radeon X600 XT is an excellent card and being the first test of the waters with PCI Express it looks very interesting and should be a great thing to look forward to now in the future. That said, the performance advantage compared to AGP is not something that is fantastic or that one would need today or even until far in the future.
Motherboards with PCI Express on them for AMD processors will be shipping in October, then we will have a better range of motherboards and tests to run through. But while testing with the Intel platform, the Sapphire proved itself to be excellent, With amazing ease of use in overclocking and real results due to the custom A.P.E. software, a quiet but excellent cooling solution, a game bundle that no one can top, and additional frills such as VIVO and temperature monitoring you can not go wrong purchasing this card.
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