LOSTCIRCUITS

Final Words

The results are in and the verdict is pretty clear, there is no real need to upgrade from a halfway decent platform to PCIe and SLI in order to get superior gaming performance. The interesting aspect here is the price erosion occurring at the very high end of graphics cards, that is, the RADEON X850XT is available for approximately US$ 450,- and change – a price point at which only a few weeks ago not even a “skimpy” X800XL was to be found on the shelves or online. At the same time, the midrange of the market does not see that sort of price drop and that pushes a low-end SLI configuration in close vicinity of the high-end RADEON.

Leaving out the fluctuations between the different applications that are partially driver-related, partially just a matter of benchmark preference, what it really comes down to is an approximately $100 price overhead still incurred with the X850 XT Platinum Edition over for example two eVGA GeForce 6600GTs, which is about ½ of the cost of an nForce4 SLI board. This does not include the extra time and hassle of upgrading a motherboard, which is not the biggest hurdle in the world but a nuisance at least.

Bottomline is that all of a sudden, there are alternatives available even for older systems to run the latest and greatest games out there with all eye candy turned on and the entire package deal is available at less than the cost of the cheapest Dell system. Needless to say that the performance is orders of magnitude above such an off the shelf solution.

The Bad

We all love Sapphire but there are a few issues with their line of graphics adapters and with the X850XT Platinum Ed. in particular. The first issue is the complete lack of documentation of anything going beyond how to insert the card into the AGP slot and fasten it on the case. It would be highly desirable to have at least some mentioning of the different adapters and the VIVO capabilities in the manual, not to mention the dedicated analog in connector that is NOT an auxiliary power connector.

The software bundle is a bit stale by now. Prince of Persia and SplinterCell are ok but both have seen better days and certainly don’t do the X850XT PE justice. The famous Redline utility is – in the form it is provided on the CD – useless since none of the high-end cards are supported by it. I am always amused reading reviews of the latest cards and talking about the automatic overclocking capabilities straight out of the box, probably the reviewers read the print on the retail box and rephrased it to give it a little more substance. To be fair, though, the utility is useable but its use requires the download of a patch from SapphireTech’s website. The question that comes to mind is, though, that this has been known for at least 8-9 months and ever since nobody has been able to upgrade the utility to make it work or at least add the patch onto the CD? This is somewhat hard to believe and an example of trying to save in the wrong spot.

The Noisy

The X850XT PE uses a dual slot cooling configuration and one thing this setup is not is quiet. Certainly, the Sapphire X850XT PE is far from the vacuum cleaner levels we experienced with some of the earlier high-end GeForce cards, but nonetheless, the noise easily overshadows most current CPU coolers, at least those used for the Athlon64. In other words, the X850XT PE is not a card for the noise-sensitive, the levels remain just below the annoyance threshold but the card is not anywhere near any of the X800XT or XLs. If that is the price that one is willing to pay for extreme performance, then that is not a problem, if noise is a factor, then any of the lower performance cards is probably a better choice.

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