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| Sapphire RADEON X800XT vs. GeForce 6800GT and a dash of RADEON X300 | |
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(Review by MS, Nov. 3, 2004) |
| GeForce 6800GT At: |
Conclusion
There is little doubt that PCIe is here to stay but on the other hand, there is no incentive per se to move up to PCIe if there is a good AGP solution already present. PCIe by itself is not a recipe for grandeur, in fact, the X300 performs approximately on the level of Intel's latest integrated graphics or even slightly worse, making it very difficult to place any value on this particular card. The 128 MB version with its 256 bit memory interface may be slightly better and deserve its nitch market, though.
X800XT vs. GeForce 6800GT
It appears as if ATI has finally realized that there is very limited value in a scaled down version that runs on three legs or 12 pipelines, as attractive as this concept might have originally been to the marketing department. As long as generic benchmarks and games are run, it doesn't matter, however, almost by definition, those who are interested in purchasing the latest graphics adapters are also the ones who are interested in playing the latest games and that is where the lack of the 4th pipeline block can really hurt the performance. The decision, therefore, to distinguish the PCIe versions solely on the basis of the engine frequency and furbish the cards with lower grade memory appears a step in the right direction, or at least along the path beaten already by nVidia.
So far so good, in the end it comes down to the bundle, the price, the warranty and the customer service. The latter two parameters are somewhat difficult to evaluate, the first two are easy to answer. In terms of the bundle, the Sapphire card looks almost as good as the ASUS cards and slightly better than the MSI cards, everybody else is pretty much left in the dust. Price wise, it is a tie with other cards of the same caliber. In terms of documentation and manual the Sapphire sucks but we won't overvalue this issue. Bottom line is that the Sapphire X800XT with its extra features is still worth every penny of the retail price.
On the other hand, we have the GeForce 6800GT which on a price/performance basis bests the X800XT and - even though it still may be out in the future, offers an expansion path to SLI.
In the end, we had two outstanding contenders and we tossed a coin ...
| Sapphire X800XT: |
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