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Redline and Overclocking

Amongst the utilities bundled with all Sapphire cards is the “Redline” overclocking utility that automatically increases core and memory speed of the graphics card until it becomes unstable. Stability assessments are unfortunately somewhat subjective, it is easy enough to ignore some minor artifacts like occasionally flashing triangles or white-out of individual pixels. In so far, “overclocking results” posted on the web have to be taken with more than just a grain of salt. Often enough the results shown refer plain and simply to the ability to move the slider on Powerstrip to some academic value without the card immediately being subjected to a cataclysmic shutdown.

Using those criteria, the overclocking capabilities of the X800XL were confined to 9 MHz (409 MHz as opposed to the default 400 MHz) or 2.25% for the core and 29 MHz (519 MHz as opposed to the default 490 MHz) or 5.9 % on the memory side of the hardware.

Conclusion

The benchmarks shown in this review won’t qualify the Sapphire HYBRID X800XL as the overall winner in the performance category and, frankly, they were not supposed to anyway. Excluding the single card GeForce 6600GT, the X800XL is the cheapest card in the roundup with a target price of $300, ranking way below most of the X800Pro cards out there and for that, the performance is phenomenal. In addition, where the GeForce 6600GT series is limited by the 128 MB of LFB – resulting in out of memory errors in more complex workloads – the 256 MB on-board memory of the X800XL dispel any worries that anything like that might happen. Add the cool running and the reduced power demand and Sapphire has a clear winner.

Unfortunately, as always, there is no such thing as a free lunch and all of the potential and real benefits of the X800XL are negated by one simple fact: the card does not exist in the retail channel. A check on Shopping.com turned up the only thing that within the last 30 days the card has not been listed with a single of the participating vendors – from Newegg to TigerDirect, neither has any other RADEON XL been listed.

This is somewhat contrasting to the statements from ATI that the supply bottleneck does not really exist, it is only the OEMs who gobble up all cards available. Granted that this may be true, the gist of that message is that ATI does not seem to care about the enthusiast community and that is a very dangerous ground to walk on. OEMs switch their suppliers at the blink of an eye, moreover, they FOLLOW the enthusiast community. Suffice it to say that a breeze is enough to to be blown to the wrong side of that community but that it will take a hurricane to be pushed back on track. Along those lines, it took ATI about 3 years to overcome the legacy of inferior drivers, need we say more?

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