Sapphire Radeon X800 XL Ultimate Review - PAGE 1

While ATI has admittedly been falling behind in the graphics race, allowing themselves to be beaten-to-market by NVIDIA with their next-generation G70, and then again with a 20-pipe rehash of the G70 under the "7800 GT" moniker, ATI fans have been more or less kept satiated with ATI's highly-successful R42x design.

By delivering a GPU capable of copious performance levels, while consuming relatively small amounts of power and dissipating relatively small amounts of heat, ATI has managed to stay competitive with everything NVIDIA has to offer up until very recently. In February, ATI re-released their R420/R423 GPU using a 0.11u process technology, allowing it to run even cooler and be cheaper to manufacture. This new reiteration is dubbed R430, and it is what you will find today's Sapphire Radeon X800 XL Ultimate.

ATI, unlike NVIDIA, manufactures their own boards along with their partners -- and ATI's premier board partner at this point happens to be Sapphire, from whom we have received their latest mid-range offering. It is impossible to think of an ATI-powered video card without think of Sapphire, as they are usually one of the first, if not the first to market with new video cards featuring ATI's latest GPUs. Sapphire is on top of the game when it comes to supplying full retail boxes with newly-announced ATI products, and this has made their name almost synonymous with ATI-powered video cards.

Today in the review basket is a reincarnation of a very similar product that we have already reviewed from Sapphire. Sapphire's "Radeon X800 XL Ultimate" is in all shapes and sizes identical to the Sapphire Radeon X800 XL that we reviewed here -- with the exception that it sports a Zalman VF700 GPU cooler. With CPU, case, hard drive, and power supply manufacturers alike now taking a very serious look at computer noise (which went oft-ignored in the years leading up to now), a video card with a 3rd-party specialty cooler is a very welcome addition.

The specifications of the Sapphire Radeon X800 XL Ultimate remain unchanged. Let's take a look at ATI's X8xx line-up:

Let's see what the Radeon X800 XL Ultimate has in store for us.