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Sapphire Radeon X800XT Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Saturday, 09 October 2004 |
Rage3D has published their Sapphire
Radeon X800XT Review. Sapphire, along with other Add-In-Board partners, has been
clamoring for an adequate supply of 16-pipeline R420 cores since it was first
introduced last spring. Even now supply is still tight and many AIBs have grown
increasingly frustrated with not being able to meet consumer demand for their
cards. With this ever increasing and incessant demand for X800XT cores, ATI has begun qualifying 16-pipeline
R420 cores at lower clock speeds and has started selling them to AIBs to be sold
as X800XT Radeons. While the plan was always to have an X800XT card on the
market, it was at first intended to be exclusive to the PCI-Express architecture
but these new X800XT Radeons are now available for both PCI-Express and AGP
architectures.
 Sapphire Radeon X800XT Review
There's really not much else I can fault Sapphire's X800XT for. It has a kick-ass bundle with Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Price of Persia: The Sands of Time, among other software odds and ends. It's smoking fast thanks to the 16-pipe R420 core, which runs only 20MHz slower than the X800XT Platinum, and it has the same 1.6ns Samsung memory that the Platinum cards also use. It overclocks pretty good too, going beyond Platinum speeds, so if overclocking a $500 card doesn't bother you then you can get a Platinum, or even better, for a bit cheaper. The fact that it's a single-slot card and that it doesn't require an overly beefy PSU is good, and the VIVO features is a nice bonus.
The only thing that comes up is that it's pretty expensive at around $500 on the street, especially for a card which is not at the top of the performance heap (though it is very close). That's a pretty small point to make though considering the fact that the Sapphire X800XT is on par or cheaper than most other X800XT's and comes with a much better bundle than most. Considering how near impossible the X800XT Platinum cards are to find, the X800XT is probably the fastest ATI based card you'll easily come across. That's all there is to say about Sapphire's X800XT really. Fast, excellent bundle.
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