LOSTCIRCUITS

Final Words

Time for an early Christmas shopping spree. That's in a nutshell the verdict on the Sapphire RADEON X800 GTO². One thing is rather predictable, this card will not suffer from an extended shelf life, in fact, it should be selling like hotcakes, so grab one while they last. Arguably, there will be difference in the overclocking potential and the specimen we had on our test bench may have been an exception but from what we can tell by reading reviews all over the web, each one of these cards appears to clock at least to 540 MHz core speed. The 16 pipelines are essentially guaranteed.

One thing that struck us as a bit odd is the fact that the Sapphire RADEON X800 GTO² does not appear to need the exuberant cooling enabled by the monstrosities we have gotten used to on the X850 series. Again, there could be a difference in the silicon mixture compared to the earlier versions or else, it might simply be that the lower specifications of the GTO² don't warrant this kind of effort, after all, most modders are probably more adept at adding some extra cooling beef than flashing a video BIOS. Either way, even in the present form, the solution at hand works and does not require an update, at least as long as the cold season is concerned or the card is run in an air conditioned environment.

That still does not mean that there will not be any additional benefits from better cooling solutions, in fact, the Sapphire RADEON X800 GTO² could easily become the preferred modder's pet for an ultra high-end graphics card. All in all, there is no denying that Sapphire has a killer product that like hardly any other graphics card out there deserves the highest merit award.

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