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Sapphire Radeon X1800 XT |
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Late… but not too little |
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by Josh Walrath |
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ATI also paid close attention to the video reproduction quality, and implemented a whole suite of features that it wraps into the Avivo technology. This is designed to give better video performance and quality with a wide variety of applications. One of the biggest applications ATI is aiming at is H.264 playback, and the R520 is able to accelerate that in hardware quite nicely. Avivo also constitutes improved color accuracy, improved de-interlacing, and lower CPU cycles needed for video playback. With the 5.13 Catalyst drivers and beyond ATI has enabled this functionality for their X1x00 series of cards, with the greatest benefits geared towards the top end R520 based cards.
The packaging is not really up to Sapphire's regular standards, but it is good enough to protect the card. In the end ATI has produced a very impressive chip with a whole slew of advanced technologies incorporated into it. There are some drawbacks though. ATI has essentially produced a 320+ million transistor product which pulls in the power and exudes a lot of heat. TSMC’s 90 nm process is still very new, and ATI’s first try has turned out to be a bit of a barn burner. While it is still able to run fast, it needs some good cooling and a solid power supply to keep it going. So what is the big issue with this chip in the marketplace? The biggest issue is that it is very late to market, and by the time it was showing up on shelves the “older” GeForce 7800 GTX was in great supply and the price was dropping to sub $500 levels. NVIDIA also released the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 that was clocked much higher than the regular 7800 GTX, and had double the memory. Not only was it double the memory, but that memory ran MUCH faster than the standard 7800 GTX. We are talking memory running at 850 MHz (1700 MHz effective). This is the fastest memory available on the market, and it is expensive. The only thing that really kept the 7800 GTX 512 from overshadowing the X1800 XT is that the 7800 is in very low supply as compared to demand. It is far, far easier (and cheaper) to buy a X1800 XT than it is to get a 7800 GTX 512. The Sapphire X1800 XT Sapphire is a very close partner to ATI, and they in fact produce most of the ATI branded boards out there. As such they have a very close working relationship with ATI, and they often are the first to receive chips for Sapphire branded boards. With the R520 being released in late November to retailers, Sapphire had very little time to get this product to market for the holiday season. Not only that, but the R580 was due to be released by the end of January. This did not give Sapphire any time to produce a unique product as they had done in the past. There will not be an X1800 XT Ultimate version, but rather their products will be relegated to the vanilla X1800 XT setup proscribed by ATI. This means that there will not be a special fan or other features that Sapphire has been known to produce for the ATI series of chips. What Sapphire can do is produce a very solid product for a good price and that is the road they took. The X1800 XT features the stock fan and heatsink that ATI developed for this card, as well as the same outputs and PCB. Each X1800 XT features two dual-link DVI ports which can drive LCD monitors to 2560 x 1600 (like the Apple Cinema and the new Dell 30” displays).
The Sapphire bundle is always top notch. The card also includes HDTV outputs as well as VIVO functionality. It really is an all-in-one board for most video applications. All outputs are very sharp and clean, and the latest Catalyst drivers help to maximize the video quality on HDTV’s using the component adapter for the video card. The card is very well built, and the heatsink/fan is also of top quality. It is all put together very well, and I did not see any quality issues with this setup. Sapphire always includes a compelling bundle with their products, and this card is no exception. The box contains the VIVO, S-Video, Composite, and Component cables. It also includes 2 x DVI to VGA adapters, as well as the 2 x 4 pin Molex to PCI-E Graphics power adapter. Software includes the installation CD, Power DVD 5, Power Director 3DE, and the Sapphire Select game DVD (contains 4 full games that the user can choose from, and includes the ability to keep 2 of the games). Let us not forget one of the best features of this card: the 512 MB of 750 MHz GDDR-3. Other than the 7800 GTX 512, this is the only top end card in the market to feature such a memory density. While the extra memory is not really needed in most modern applications, it will soon be the de-facto standard for top end cards. Applications such as Battlefield 2 and F.E.A.R. show a significant improvement by using a 512 MB card over a 256 MB card, and soon more apps will follow that will also demand that much memory for top performance. Sapphire does a very nice job with this product and its bundle, and they are typically priced lower than the stock ATI cards which feature less of a bundle (not to mention the other competitors with X1800 XT parts). Currently a full retail X1800 XT from Sapphire comes in slightly under $500. This is not far off from the many GeForce 7800 GTX cards which are lower performing and have ½ the memory. The X1800 XT series of cards are really starting to look like much more of a bargain than many give them credit for.
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