What’s this? A Sapphire card without some funky name? Well that’s what we have here today. With the announcement of ATI’s X800 line, the video card wars are heating up again and today we take a look at the Sappphire
X800 Pro. It’s the lesser card of the X800 series but it certainly performs like a top of the line card.
By now you’ve probably heard of the X800 line so we’ll do a brief rundown of the features. The
X800 Pro is a 12 pipeline solution running at 475MHz at the core and 900MHZ DDR at the memory. Onboard are 256MB of Samsung GDDR3 RAM. New features over the
9800XT are…well… not too much. Here’s a comparison of the
Radeon 9800XT and the
Radeon X800 Pro along with the
Radeon X800 PE card that we will be reviewing later.
Besides a few updates to Smartshader, Smoothvision, and Videoshader de-interlacing scheme, there aren’t really any new features. There’s no Pixel Shader 3.0 support like NVIDIA’s new card. More pipelines, faster clock speeds, and some tweaking is what the X800 series has over the 9800XT. For some that may come to be a disappointment. But most people are really concerned with speed and image quality and as long as it’s blazingly fast and looks good, that’s really the bottom line.
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