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Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO 256MB AGP Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 14 October 2004 |
The Crucible has reviewed the Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO 256MB AGP graphics card. The battle for the leadin the PC graphics market has been heating up over the past few years. Both ATI and NVIDIA push and shove and vye for the top spot. There is no clear winner in these battles, and there may never be. We are not going to delve in to that war, too much. More to the point, we are going to take a look at ATI's light heavyweight contender the Radeon X800 PRO, Sapphire style.
 Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO 256MB AGP Review
For roughly $600 you can have a card that will not only run all of today's hottest titles, but run them extremely well. The Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO is an extremely fast card, there is no doubt about that. There was nothing that we could throw at this card that couldn't be handled. Aside from trying to run high levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering with extremely high resolution frame rates ran high and stayed fairly stable.
We did run in to some odd problems with Half-Life 2 video stress test, as well as Doom 3. We found an odd purple shimmering with vering levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. This anomoly was repeatable in several tests, and only occured while anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. We are not sure if it is a problem with the Catalyst 4.9 drivers, or these game's engines.
If you are looking for a great card to play any game you can throw at it, Sapphire's Radeon X800 PRO is a great choice. With a price that beats most other brands Sapphire offers great performance with it's Radeon X800 PRO. While there are faster cards available they also come with a much higher price tag. The price difference between the PRO and the XT is almost $200. Whether or not that performance is worth the extra cost is solely up to you. Either way you won't be disappointed in the performance, but make sure you pay the rent first.
If you are a serious gamer looking for a serious card, but don't want to spend the serious money then the Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO just may be the card for you. With it's excellent performance and decent price the Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO is sure to please. The overclocking results were good, but the bundle came up a little disappointing. While bundled extra's are nice, we know it is performance that sells and Sapphire's Radeon X800 PRO came up big in the performance department.
When you look at the price and performance of the Radeon X800 PRO and compare with the GeForce 6800 GT, the scale seems to tip slightly in favor of the GeForce 6800 GT. While the performance difference is minimal, the GeForce 6800 GT generally costs about $15 to $20 less than the Radeon X800 PRO. When it comes to pending your own hard earned dollars, I'll let you choose the winner.
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