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Sapphire Radeon X800XT vs. GeForce 6800GT |
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Written by Mavke
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Sunday, 07 November 2004 |
Lost Circuits has put up a clash between the Sapphire Radeon X800XT and the GeForce 6800GT. Sapphire is one of the bigger players in the gamut of ATI partners featuring a full repertoire of ATI R420-based graphics cards. We took the PCIe version of their X800XT and ran it through the paces of a few benchmarks in comparison to the direct competitor - the GeForce 6800 GT - but in the end it came down to Doom 3 vs. FarCry. Taking everything into account, we still had to toss a coin to declare a winner.
 Sapphire Radeon X800XT vs. GeForce 6800GT
It appears as if ATI has finally realized that there is very limited value in a scaled down version that runs on three legs or 12 pipelines, as attractive as this concept might have originally been to the marketing department. As long as generic benchmarks and games are run, it doesn't matter, however, almost by definition, those who are interested in purchasing the latest graphics adapters are also the ones who are interested in playing the latest games and that is where the lack of the 4th pipeline block can really hurt the performance. The decision, therefore, to distinguish the PCIe versions solely on the basis of the engine frequency and furbish the cards with lower grade memory appears a step in the right direction, or at least along the path beaten already by nVidia.
So far so good, in the end it comes down to the bundle, the price, the warranty and the customer service. The latter two parameters are somewhat difficult to evaluate, the first two are easy to answer. In terms of the bundle, the Sapphire card looks almost as good as the Asus cards and slightly better than the MSI cards, everybody else is pretty much left in the dust. Price wise, it is a tie with other cards of the same caliber. In terms of documentation and manual the Sapphire sucks but we won't overvalue this issue. Bottom line is that the Sapphire X800XT with its extra features is still worth every penny of the retail price.
On the other hand, we have the GeForce 6800GT which on a price/performance basis bests the X800XT and - even though it still may be out in the future, offers an expansion path to SLI.
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