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Introduction

As far as the mainstream goes, ATI has had only limited success in the past three years with recapturing the success that they saw with their 9500 and 9600 pro cards. They have not had much issue keeping up with NVIDIA above the $300 price mark, but most consumers do not purchase add-in boards at that price point. Their past two attempts at products built from the ground up (as in not crippled versions of a more expensive card on identical PCB) have been almost total failures. The X700 XT never even made it to market with its Pro brethren biting the dust hard at retail, and the X1600 Pro, their latest attempt, has not done any better.

In the summer of 2005, ATI launched quietly its X800 GT card in an attempt to squash the commanding sales lead that the 6600 GT had over its X700 Pro. The X800 GT beat the 6600 GT in most benchmarks, but was based on architecture that was over a year old and as a result, had no support for Shader Model 3.0, and did not support dual graphics cards as the 6600 GT did in SLI. Just over six months ago, ATI released the X800 GTO which, like the X800 GT, used surplus R480 cores that did not meet X850 XT spec. Unlike the X800 GT however, the GTO featured 12 pipelines, and in many cases, unlocked to a full 16.

The ironic aspect of the X800 GTO was that it was released after the announcement of the X1600 XT, shredding what scraps of dignity the X1600 series had left after its very poor launch benchmark scores and its very delayed absence at retail. Despite the fact that the X800 GTO did fairly well, ATI had been relying on a card based on architecture more than a year and a half old as their mainstream mainstay, until March 2006, when they finally got around to releasing a proper entry into the midend segment. The X1800 GTO, while launched in March, did not hit retail until early April of this year, and has seen fair success heretofore.

Sapphire have sent us their X1800 GTO for review and we will be putting it through its paces to see how it measures up to the competition from NVIDIA, and to see where precisely it fits into ATIs fairly large product lineup.