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Sapphire X800 AGP VIVO Review |
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Midrange Greatness? |
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by Scott Tammel |
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edited by Josh Walrath |
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Introduction The graphics arms race has been going full swing for quite some time now with ‘The Big Two’ trading blow for blow and mistake for mistake. The midrange market had a pretty large shakeup in the past year, especially with the release of the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT. At that time on the AGP side ATI had not refreshed their lineup, keeping the 9800 series of boards as the offerings from $150 to $249. ATI did release the X700 series of chips and boards, but these were not offered to the AGP crowd. ATI found themselves in a strange spot, with NVIDIA eating up a pretty good share of the midrange AGP market with their 6600 series of cards. Something had to be done. The X800 from Sapphire The R4xx family of chips has been out for over a year now, but for those who are still using AGP based motherboards, the upgrade path hasn’t been as glorious. The good news for those people who live on real world budgets and can’t splurge yet to upgrade (me included) is that ATI has released a version of the 110 nm X800 in AGP form. While the X800 is technically the slowest and most basic in the family, it still brings a lot to the table. It is essentially an X800 XL with the dials turned down a bit. It has one of the quad pixel pipes disabled (giving it a total of 12 working pipelines) but still has a core clock speed of 400 MHz.
Like all of Sapphire's retail offerings, they include a transparent portion so the actual card itself can be viewed. Sapphire definitely makes a mean package! The Rialto bridge chip on the back of the card enables the PCI-E native R430 to communicate with the PC over the AGP bus. NVIDIA was the first to release their HSI chip (High Speed Interconnect) bridge chip, but unlike Rialto, HSI can be used bi-directionally (connect AGP chips to PCI-E as well as connect PCI-E chips to AGP). Neither product is really superior to the other, but ATI did not see the need to use the Rialto chip for AGP based chips, since most of their AGP lineup had native PCI-E parts already available.
Everything is neatly packaged and organized. While the overall specifications of the AGP X800 do not vary from that of its PCI-E brethren, the board design is significantly different due to the inclusion of the Rialto bridge chip. Just like the PCI-E version it has 256MB of GDDR3 memory as opposed to the 128MB reference. You may notice also that there is an external power connector on the board. The AGP card does need the extra juice boost that the PCI-E format can natively provide. The X800 doesn’t have a copper heatsink setup but an aluminum one. Even stranger is compared to the stock Sapphire X800 XL card Josh reviewed a few weeks ago, this units heatsink setup covers the RAM on the front of the card and includes a heat spreader on the rear RAM. Note the freaky lady that graces the box and the heatsink.
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