LOSTCIRCUITS

Advanced Features

The Sapphire RADEON X800XT sports the ATI Rage Theatre chip originally found only on the AIW series and, thus adds TiVO functionality, which, by itself is probably worth the price overhead over an X800 Pro model, not to mention the fact that currently no PCIe models are available using the clipped "12 pipelines only" version of the R420.

      

Overclocking

As mentioned earlier, the Redline utility needed a patch in order to install, on the other hand, overclocking can be done easily with the latest version of Powerstrip or else with ATI Tools Ver 0.0.2.2 available as a free download from e.g. Guru of 3D .

Unfortunately, the utilities are only of marginal value if the card itself does not cooperate. While there was no problem overclocking the X800XT on the desktop, at least to 20 MHz above core, 3D applications either crashed or produced erratic benchmarks at any setting more than ~ 10 MHz over default. Similar results were found for the memory, on the desktop we were able to crank the frequency up to 610 MHz and the card would even get through e.g. a single run of a FarCry demo but inevitably crashed under continuous load at anything higher than 530 MHz. In addition, the benchmark results with the overclocked card were all over the place, from a 20% increase over default to 30% below default caused by stutter and temporary stalling.

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