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Sapphire X800 XL Ultimate

Silent but Deadly

by Josh Walrath

            While the VF700 is a heavy cooler, it probably pales in comparison to the copper version of the product.  For this application the standard VF700 is more than adequate.  Once I overclocked the board to its highest point, the cooler continued to keep it very cool to the touch.  The cooler is not holding this chip back in terms of overclocking.

A pretty impressive bundle, with games, DVD-Player, cables, adapters, manuals, and the driver and Redline CD.  Let's not forget about the card itself!

            Once the board is installed in the PCI-E graphics slot, the Catalyst drivers are run and everything works as advertised.  2D visual quality is essentially perfect.  Even at high resolutions the X800 XL Ultimate did not show any fuzziness or blurriness in the display.  Even resolutions higher than 1600x1200 showed up perfectly.  One thing that Sapphire has not skimped on is the quality of its VGA output.  In every Sapphire board I have ever tested, the output has always been of this high quality.

            HDTV support is another impressive option, and with the latest Cat drivers it apparently works very well.  Initially there were many complaints about the quality of HDTV out for ATI cards, but it appears as though they have taken care of this little issue.

We can see that the fan and heatsink are quite a bit larger than the standard unit.

            Overall, the average consumer is going to be impressed with this product even before they plug it into their computer.  Once it is installed, the impression becomes even more positive.  The X800 XL Ultimate is a very nice card, and I think the user willing to spend over $300 for this board will be very happy with the results. 

Test Setup

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ running at 2.64 GHz

1 GB Corsair XMS 3200 XL DIMMS running at 240 MHz

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum SLI Motherboard

SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit

Toshiba DVD-ROM

Seagate 160 GB SATA NCQ HD

PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 Express/SLI Power Supply

Windows XP Professional SP 2

DirectX 9.0c 

            I decided to run these tests on an overclocked system so that the CPU will not be as much of a bottleneck in applications that are more CPU intensive.  For the ATI card I ran the Catalyst 5.4 drivers, while on the NVIDIA board I used the 71.89 drivers.

            I was able to overclock the X800 XL Ultimate to an impressive 465 MHz core, and 587 MHz memory (1174 MHz effective).  This is much higher than the stock X800 XL that I tested earlier.  In fact, it is one of the highest X800 XL overclocks that I have seen.  It was able to go higher, but would often lock up in shader intensive apps like Half Life 2. 

Results

3D Mark 2005

            While 3D Mark has its fans and detractors, I find it a useful tool to help understand some of the intricacies of a specific video card and its architecture.

            In 3D Mark 2005 we see the X800 XL and 6800 GT to be neck and neck in terms of overall performance.  Some areas are stronger than others, but overall they tend to match each other very well.  The overclocked X800 XL of course takes a tremendous lead in most of the tests.  Something also to consider is that the 6800 GT utilizes SM 3.0 code in this benchmark, which can give it a slight edge in overall efficiency.  We can see this on the Pixel Shader test where it is significantly faster than the standard X800 XL, and only when the X800 XL is overclocked does it run faster than the 6800 GT.

Next: More Results

Copyright 1999-2005 PenStar Systems, LLC.