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| Sapphire RADEON X850XT Platinum Edition AGP AGP Strikes Back | |
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(Review by MS, May 30, 2005) |
| GeForce 6800GT At: |
The Sapphire RADEON X850XT Platinum Edition and its Competitors
| Core Clock [MHz] | Pixel Pipelines | Texture Units/Pixel Pipeline | Fill Rate (Single) [MPixels/sec] | Fill Rate (Multi) [MTexels/sec] | Memory Clock [Mbps] | Memory Bus Width [bit] | Memory Bandwidth [GB/s] | |
| GeForce 6600GT | 500 | 8 | 1 | 4000 | 4000 | 1000 | 128 | 16.0 |
| RADEON 9600 XT | 500 | 4 | 1 | 2000 | 2000 | 600 | 128 | 9.6 |
| RADEON 9800 | 380 | 8 | 1 | 3040 | 3040 | 680 | 256 | 21.8 |
| RADEON X700XT | 475 | 8 | 1 | 3800 | 3800 | 1050 | 128 | 26.8 |
| ASUS RADEON 9800 XT | 410 | 8 | 1 | 3280 | 3280 | 730 | 256 | 23.36 |
| GeForce 6800GT | 350 | 16 | 1 | 5600 | 5600 | 1000 | 256 | 35.2 |
| GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme | 450 | 16 | 1 | 7200 | 7200 | 1100 | 256 | 35.2 |
| ASUS RADEON X800Pro | 475 | 12 | 1 | 5700 | 5700 | 900 | 256 | 28.8 |
| Sapphire RADEON X800XL | 400 | 16 | 1 | 6400 | 6400 | 980 | 256 | 31.36 |
| Sapphire RADEON X800XT | 500 | 16 | 1 | 8000 | 8000 | 1000 | 256 | 32.0 |
| RADEON X800XT Platinum Edition | 520 | 16 | 1 | 8320 | 8320 | 1120 | 256 | 35.4 |
| RADEON X850XT Platinum Edition | 540 | 16 | 1 | 8640 | 8640 | 1180 | 256 | 37.76 |
In terms of the raw technical specs, the X850XT PE easily qualifies as the most powerful single graphics card in the field. On the other hand, there is the still rather steep street price of approximately $450.-, which needs to be compared to whatever a somewhat equivalent SLI solution would amount to. Granted that SLI - despite all recent progress - still does have some issues, primarily in older games, and furthermore requires at least an upgrade of the main board, the cost balance still is in favor of the X850XT PE, and, as argued, earlier, the upgrade road is definitely much less rocky. Of course, quite a bit also depends on what kind of platform it is that will be upgraded. To draw an arbitrary line, souping up an existing system running on anything less than a 400 MHz memory bus, preferably in dual channel won't make much sense. On the other hand, even with an AthlonXP 3200 or an older P4 (Northwood) running on an i875 chipset, the upgrade path does make sense, especially if it is a GeForce3, Radeon 9700 / 9800 or equivalent that are being replaced. But we are jumping ahead of ourselves.
System Configuration
All benchmark results shown in the rest of this review were acquired using the following system configurations:
Test Setup #1 (AGP)
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Test Setup #2 (PCIe)
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Graphics Adapters:
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Software:
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One thing that is quite obvious here is that we are comparing apples and oranges, at least with respect to the chipset. On the other hand, this is exactly the situation that most upgraders will be facing, Since there is no way to compare all possible different system configurations especially on a price performance basis we stuck with a rather simplistic approach using a high-end AMD Athlon64 4000+ to eliminate at least the CPU bottleneck as far as possible.
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Sapphire Technology RADEON X850 PE |
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