Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO² Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

ATI up until this summer had a crisis on their hands. While they were busy selling overpriced X700 pro's to a few ATI-committed mainstream users, NVIDIA were swamped with production of 6600 GT cores. The 6600 GT offers very good performance for a very small amount of money. As far as good performance verus price ratios went, ATI had their own winner, the X800 XL. The X800 XL is still one of the best cards you can buy for the money, and is capable of running alongside (and sometimes faster) than the 6800 GT from NVIDIA. Despite strong X800 XL sales, ATI still had a massive gap in their lineup.

A strong majority of people in the market for video cards have no interest in spending more than ~$250 on just one of the three key facilitators in computer performance, thus leading them to NVIDIA's 6600 GT. ATI in August finally came up with a rebuttal in their X800 GT boards. The cards were built on surplus cores from higher end models that didn't make full spec.

Despite the strong performance of this card for the relatively low amount of money they could be had for (roughly $165) ATI still felt the need for yet another midrange graphics SKU. Out of that need comes the X800 GTO. The card again uses surplus cores from bad yields of X850 XT PE and X800 XL chip wafers, but comes with 12 pipes enabled rather than the sixteen of the faster cards. This is where Sapphire comes in.

What Sapphire have done with their (unfortunately) limited edition X800 GTO² cards, is ship them with only 12 pipes enabled, but 4 more ready to be unlocked. The BIOS of the card is easily flashable with a widely available replacement, which boosts the card to X800 XL status. Seeing as this card is built on the R480 (or X850 XT) core, overclocking it to the speeds of the full fledged card should not be a problem either, similar to what we experienced with the Powercolor X800 GTO last week.

This is definitely a high value, pro-consumer proposition.