Sapphire's New Generation: Sapphire Hybrid RX800XL /RX800, Sapphire Toxic RX700PRO/RX800PRO AGP
Final Words
First, note the superb design of Sapphire products reviewed today. All the solutions are made at very high quality, and boards of the Toxic series are also equipped with a very efficient and quiet cooling system.
The rich packaged bundle also proved to be a nice bonus, and the boxes themselves are bright, colorful and attractive to look, worth the products.
But boxes are not yet all, and even their numbers don't matter, so let's move on to the most essential part - the performance totals.
Sapphire Hybrid RX800XL
Despite some loss at DOOM3, the card on the whole performed quite well - both in Half-Life2 and Far Cry. We are not dwelling at the synthetics, just brought in the results for information only.
As to the price, the recommended figure for this board is about 370$. Of course, novelties are still in acute shortage in the retail, and at first the price may (and will) be overstated. But remember that the competitive solution - PCI-E GeForce 6800GT announced much earlier is unfortunately too difficult to make available
The recommended price for 6800GT is also around 450-500$, so the difference is one of the main trumps of Õ800XL.
Also, Õ800XL unlike GeForce 6800GT does not require plugging in additional power, so it is possible to indirectly compare the difference in heat emission (Õ800XL is made on the 0.11 mk process technology, offers reduced heat emission, unlike 6800GT).
At the overclocking capabilities, our card specimen easily overclocked to 450/1140 MHz, which is quite a good result. What is left for now is to saturate the market, so we again hope there won't be problems at that.
For now, we reward the Sapphire RX800 XL with our "Editor's choice" medal.
Sapphire Hybrid RX800
Since the recommended price for this product is about 300$, its comparison with GeForce 6600GT
makes absolutely no sense - indeed, a 6600GT can be bought anywhere at around $200. So the major comparison we'll be doing is one versus the solution based on NV41 - GeForce 6800 of the PCI-E interface, because both these products offer very close recommended price. The situation with availability of both solutions on sale is absolutely similar to that described above - we only have to wait and hope that the prices won't be too overstated.
As regards the performance, Õ800 shows absolutely comfortable FPS in most applications tested up to 1600õ1200 inclusive (and up to 1280õ1024 in the demanding quality modes). The exception is DOOM3 where 4õÀÀ/8õAF gives decent FPS only at 1024õ768, and at that GeForce 6800 is a better performer.
The issue of most interest now is the possibility of turning X800 into X800XL, for example through reflashing the BIOS. In fact, the PCB, the chip are the same, with the only difference is that one offers 16 pixel pipelines, the other - 12 (provided that both offer 256 MB). Unfortunately, we were unable to experiment with both these boards, but we'll certainly verify the assumption in practice soon.
The board also showed good overclocking capability of the graphic processor - 490MHz, but we must admit we expected much more than the attained 820MHz DDR from the memory (for its 2 ns access time). Now on to "toxic" boards.
Sapphire Radeon X700 PRO Toxic
This solution is most interesting for its cooling system, because the aspects of performance for cards on the base of the RX700 (PRO) and comparison versus GeForce 6600GT have been explored well enough.
Apart form the above bonuses of the package bundle and design, the board made us happy with its complete lack of noise during operation. The recommended price for this product is about 250$, which is similar to many solutions on the base of GeForce 6600GT chip. As is evident from the benchmarking results, the latter appears to be a more attractive buy even despite the smaller number of vertex units (six in X700 PRO, and merely three in 6600GT). On the other hand, 6600GT offers an advantage for frequencies - 500/1000 versus 425/860. But that is only if Õ700 PRO runs at its default frequencies. With ÀÐÅ which allows setting 475/1000 MHz (Sapphire announces these frequencies as default for Toxic X700 PRO) the difference at operating frequencies (as compared to 6600GT) appears far not so significant.
In 6600GT, the bottleneck is the modes with the ÀÀ enabled - at that Õ700 PRO takes a sure lead, which is especially seen after increasing the used resolution, e.g. in Far Cry.
By the way, note the absolutely unexpected FPS jump in Õ700 PRO at HL2 under 1024õ768 in the mode of raw performance. That is not a bug - we ran the demo several times, and the picture did not change.
Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO Toxic
The latter board by Sapphire appears to be of higher demand to date(!) than other above solutions, because the percentage of owners of AGP systems is currently much higher than that for PCI-E systems. Along with the cooling system, the board proved outstanding with its overclocking capabilities and the possibility of remaking into Õ800ÕÒ at a much higher probability than most solutions based on Õ800 PRO by other manufacturers. Coming back to the overclocking, we say that the card was running at 540(!) MHz of the core speed, which is even higher a result than the standard GPU speed in Õ800ÕÒ ÐÅ! Also, note that like with Toxic X700 PRO this card offers the "official overclocking" available through the ÀÐÅ utility which allows raising the video memory frequency automatically to 1040MHz DDR. Sapphire guarantees a trouble-free operation of the card at this frequency.
All this allows rewarding Sapphire Radeon X800 PRO Toxic with the "Overclocker's choice" prize
Currently, the card is available in the retail at 470$ and higher. The advantage of the competitor solution - GeForce 6800GT AGP -
is the originally operative 16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex units, as well as the possibility to overclock to the speeds of GeForce 6800Ultra. The price for both cards is currently about the same.
In the upshot:
Sapphire again has proved the high quality of its produce in the sector of graphic accelerators. We are looking forward to seeing solutions on the base of Õ800XL and Õ800, as well as Õ700 PRO Toxic in our retail shops. We assume the emergence of such powerful products will provoke some rise of popularity for PCI-E solutions among the consumers.
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