SUMMARY: Mike has posted a comprehensive look at the brand new Sapphire Radeon X800 XT graphics card. After providing a complete guided tour of the product, he compares performance against an older Radeon 9800 Pro in a bunch of benchmarking applications including Doom 3 to decide if it is worth your time upgrading to ATI's latest flagship VPU product.
Once you cut the seal and open up your new toy, you’ll be greeted by everything you’d expect to see and then some. There are a lot of items to work your way through so we’ll start with the extra stuff and then work our way to the board itself.
I expected to see cabling for the board, but this covers just about any scenario you can come up with. A close look tells us that all but the Molex splitter has something to do with S-Video, so no matter how you’re planning on setting up the VIVO capabilities for the board, you’ll have the necessary cables to handle the task.
And yes, I said VIVO. You get full-fledged video in and video out functions so you’ll be able to do more than just send the display to a TV set. It also allows you to hook up to your VCR or DVD player to let you keep your favorite movies on your system.
This little device may look like a cheap piece of metal and plastic but it can be a blessing to those who want a dual display system but don’t have a digital monitor. This is a DVI-VGA adapter and allows a second VGA display to be hooked up via the DVI port on the board. From there it only takes a few seconds to set up the display properties and you’ll be all set to enjoy some dual display goodness.
Once upon a time, you could expect to see a good software package any time you purchased a new video board. When the prices of these boards began reaching into the higher realms, most manufacturers began doing away with the software to help keep prices down a bit. Sapphire has pretty much always gone back to the basics in this regard and this board is no different.
Included software consists of a driver disk, DVD playback software, digital editing software, the full version of Splinter Cell, Pandora Tomorrow and the full version of Prince of Persia, Sands of Time. If you dig down a little deeper you’ll also come up with a utility called Redline, which is Sapphire’s own overclocking utility. Yes, you heard right, Sapphire includes a utility to overclock their video board. Talk about confidence in your own product line!
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