Introduction

For several years now, the name Sapphire has meant blistering fast ATI graphics. As a company dedicated to the ATI graphics chipset, Sapphire has made for themselves a reputation of putting out a product that not only meets the factory standards, but often exceeds them.

No matter how well a manufacturer does in the past makes no difference when it comes to a new product to test out. Today's contestant is the Sapphire X1900XT graphics card. Using the newer ATI R580 chipset and fitted with 512MB of onboard memory, we're going to put it through its paces and see how it compares to graphics boards using the Radeon X8xx series chipset. We'll take a look at features and performance numbers and try to help you decide whether this product would make a worthy upgrade in your own enthusiast rig.

So relax for a bit as we take a closer look at the X1900XT graphics card from Sapphire. They don't give these boards away so we want to see if it's worth the entry fee!