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Overclocking

Overclocking with ATI's CATALYST drivers are a bit of a hit and miss - not all products are supported and the CCC version of the 5.1s that we tested with at least did not support any of the Overdrive/overclocking options. ATI users are generally left with third party utilities such as Powerstrip. Sapphire however, included a copy of their Redline tweak utility that allows for adjustments of image quality and a host of other things, but most importantly there is an overclocking utility included. The version of the Redline software that came packaged with the card required a software update from the Sapphire to work as it complained that the X800 XL was not recognized but after the patch was installed everything worked smoothly. One of the nice features about the Sapphire overclocking utility is the find the maximum function. Click a button and the utility will run tests at each clock increment for a user specified time. If no errors are detected at that clockspeed, the next clock stepping is used. This is a pretty slick process and seems more accurate than the process used by the NVIDIA drivers - attempts to move the clock and memory speed above the detected failure rate would result in crashes and artifacts. It is fairly slow however - users should be prepared to have the computer tied up for a couple hours. There are a couple outstanding gripes that I do have - the initial clock rate from which to test from seems locked so the starting point always seems to be 400 Mhz for the X800 XL. As with some of the other non-Powerstrip overclocking utilities, the clock adjustments are not single megahertz adjustments - our card would work fine at a 445 Mhz core clock but fail at 452 but there would be no intermediate steps in between. Minor gripe but I thought it would be relevant to point out. That said our X800 XL overclocked to 445 Mhz on the core and the 553 (1106) Mhz on the memory clock up from the stock 400/500; we're not quite at X850 XT speeds but it's a nice 10% bump on both the core and memory.

Conclusions

Sapphire has put together a good package with their X800 XL. It comes with a decent bundle that includes Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia along with the usual software DVD player and connector bundle. Their included Redline tweaking utility is also very nice and offers some options not found in the current Catalyst Control Center including an excellent overclocking utility. The card is a reference solution and while that is not a bad thing, we would have liked to see a different fan unit as the older style fan that was used in the X800 and 9800XT series was larger and more importantly, quieter.

The X800 XL is an important part for Sapphire and ATI as it is a legitimate contender against NVIDIA's 6800GT on both the spec sheet and more importantly, on the actual performance front. Performance between these two cards are generally fairly close. The Sapphire card has a pretty big lead in Half-Life 2 compared to the NVIDIA counterparts. The biggest sticking point is of course OpenGL performance - on older games it is really a non-issue - the Sapphire X800 XL will deliver great framerates across all resolutions and graphical settings much like the 6800GT. ATI has really stepped up their DOOM 3 performance and while the X800 XL does trail the 6800GT quite noticeably, it is on par with the regular 6800. In other apps the plain jane 6800 does not have a hope against the Sapphire X800 XL - it simply walks all over it and this part will put a lot of pressure on both the 6800GT and the 6800. Something to remember is that ATI users can also take advantage of temporal antialiasing which should work very well on this card and I believe it can sustain good framerates across most games at 2x AA at high resolutions while delivering 4x AA-like quality.

The only sticking points are availability and pricing. I do not know if it is strictly because of limited availability right now or what, but it does not look like Sapphire (or anyone else for that matter) are close to the ATI announced 299$ price point. OEM cards on Pricegrabber are going for 389$ and the retail cards are well over the 400$ mark. The performance of the Sapphire X800 XL is excellent and it certainly deserves to be in the same price range as the NVIDIA 6800GT but that said, 389$ is a long ways off of 299$. I do understand that the X800 XL cards have just been released on the market and there was the same problem of inflated pricing when the X800 Pro and others launched initially. With the current pricing levels the Sapphire RADEON X800 XL is still a very good buy - if it does manage to get dropped to the 299$ level however, the 6800 and the 6800GT will both be in very awkward positions and this would be unequivocally the PCIe card to go for.