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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Thursday, November 17, 2005
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Today's review will be focusing on one of the more high-end X1000 graphics cards, the Radeon X1800XL. We will also throw a few cards for comparison including the competing GeForce 7800 GT and Radeon X850XT PE. Currently the 7800 GT is not only cheaper than the X1800XL, but it is also widely available. This means that it will be imperative for the Radeon X1800XL to be superior in the majority of the benchmarks, but does it?
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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Included with the Sapphire motherboard is a 1394 PCI rear panel adapter with two ports, a SPDIF-in/out PCI rear panel adapter, a single PATA cable, a floppy cable, a single SATA cable, 3 CD's, an I/O cover, and the manual. Look at the I/O cover, notice anything unusual? The 3 CD's are nothing to get excited about; 1 CD contains the drivers, one contains some cheap backup, virus, and privacy software that I would never install on any computer I own, and the third is a CD of game demos. Notice that I did not mention a rear panel adapter for the USB. Pretty slim pickin's here...
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Friday, November 4, 2005
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The Sapphire X800 GTO is a very impressive card for the money. The performance on offer is extremely compelling for anyone happy running resolutions of 1024x768 and in some cases you can get away with far higher. This is one of the most impressive low end cards I've ever tested and the fact that these cards are based on cores which were destined for much higher performing parts means that the overclocking headroom on offer is high...
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Wednesday, November 2, 2005
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The Sapphire X800 GTO2 was modestly launched recently and not much hooplah had surrounded the card until it's secret was discovered. The X800 GTO2 is a 12 pipeline 256MB video card much like the vanilla X800. What is very much un-like the vanilla X800 is that the X800 GTO2 doesn't run on the same ATI430 GPU. Instead, it runs on the ATI480 GPU. For the GPU model informed you will notice that is the same GPU core model used on the Sapphire X850 video cards which pack 16 pixel pipelines...
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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If we disregard the current street prices, the Radeon X1800XL appears to be healthy competition for NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GT if we were only considering the reference clocked GT. Unfortunately, the reality is that many of NVIDIA's larger board partners ship their cards at higher speeds and are still able to compete with the smaller board partners on price. These cards are faster, it seems, than both the Sapphire and the reference GT...
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Thursday, September 29, 2005
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Priced at £129.99, the financial cost of having a passively-cooled card is a £10 or so premium over a regular ATI Radeon X800 GT0 256MB card. Is it worth it? That depends upon how much you value silence. Whatever the case, the X800 GTO is another fine addition to ATI's burgeoning PCI-Express family...
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Sunday, September 11, 2005
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When this motherboard and its controversial color theme were displayed the first time at this year's Cebit, people all over the net were debating whether Sapphire could deliver an overclocking board. Now, after a long wait, the board is finally ready. As it looks right now, Sapphire did a great job with it. The motherboard is very fast, even when not overclocked. There are a load of options available in the BIOS to tweak every little setting of the system. For new users these options can be set to 'auto' to let the board handle them automatically. The range of available options is exemplary, so is the manual which explains almost all of them...
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Saturday, September 10, 2005
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ATI have released this new low-cost core, Sapphire have taken that and released a great graphics card. To think that for less than £50/$45 you can be playing some of the latest games at 1024x768 and still be very happy with performance is amazing, compared with what happened with the previous generation of cards. For people with integrated graphics who have bought a 3d game recently, this card is an easy option to make gaming enjoyable and the HTPC owner might also benifit from this passive card...
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Friday, September 9, 2005
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This X550 from Sapphire has 256MB of memory, with 128-bit memory bandwidth. It runs with a 400MHz core and 250MHz (500MHz effective) memory. It is fairly obvious, that the X550 is little more than a speed
bump of the X300, bringing it closer to the speed and specifications of the X600...
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Monday, August 29, 2005
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ATI's Xpress 200P seemed like a strange choice, as previous partners' motherboards fell short in almost every department when compared to the established duo. However, with the mix of RX480 northbridge and SB450 southbridge, SAPPHIRE has added its own mix of design flair and an enthusiast-friendly BIOS to create a motherboard which is strong in most areas. PI-A9RX480's subjectively stunning looks are complemented by a decent layout and reasonable feature-set, and general performance is good, whilst overclocking performance is just stellar...
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Friday, August 26, 2005
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While HyperMemory may boost the performance of lower end cards, the Sapphire Radeon X300 SE is already dependant on this technology. Without HyperMemory, having just 32MB of onboard memory is barely enough for most applications today and relegates it to a laptop graphics part, and a low-end laptop at that. The performance of the Sapphire Radeon X300 SE is firmly in the low-end budget range as per its target market. It is overall faster than the older versions of the Radeon X300 SE, which had a lower memory throughput, but loses out to its main rival from the NVIDIA camp, the comparable 32MB, 64-bit memory version of the GeForce 6200 with TurboCache...
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Wednesday, August 24, 2005
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Overall though, based on the numbers we've obtained the Radeon X800 GT is very much the better choice compared to the 6600GT in terms of performance. The only question is though, is it too late? If you want to wait a couple of months prices of even faster cards are likely to drop again as ATI brings out its next gen chip. In its favour the 6600GT card offers support for Shader Model 3 and HDR. But these, especially the latter, will really require much faster cards to do them justice...
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Friday, August 12, 2005
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ATI's X800 GT SKU offers, finally, real-world performance that, on balance, overcomes NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT. Users looking to upgrade to a £100-£110 PCI-Express GPU would do well to seriously consider SAPPHIRE's X800 GT Hybrid 256MB card. AGP users will need to wait, though, and the very nature of the how the X800 GT came into being indicates that it won't be around forever, so snap it up while you still can...
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Wednesday, July 27, 2005
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Overall, you shouldn't expect amazing results with an X700 chipset powered video card. The performance for a hard-core gamer would be mediocre as newer chipsets and technologies have increased the expectations of what a video card should do. With SLI, and Crossfire in the works, this card looks basic. That said, I feel this card is quite capable of running any game with very high detail up to and including
1280x1024. Let's face it, you will not be able to play games at 1600x1200 and AA turned on with any card in the $150 price range...
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Wednesday, July 20, 2005
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"Bigger is Always Better" is the blurb for the new Radeon X800xl, 512MB edition. Well we at the Bleedinedge know that isn't necessarily true. However we were very interested when Sapphire sent us a new card with a 512MB frame buffer. Those of us that have seen the 256MB version, couldn't help but be impressed on it's price/performance ratio. The 512MB version carries a hefty £60 premium over its sibling, putting it firmly in the price bracket of the 6800GT, and nearing the cheap end of the X850 range. To justify this premium it will need to show an improvement over the 6800GT at high resolutions with high detail, else the X800XL 256MB version will prove to be the card of choice in this sector...
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