Product Reviews

With ATI's new X1000 range of graphics cards striding confidently onto the market (reviewed last month) you might think that its old X800 range of chips is defunct. You'd be wrong. Rather than ditching its old technology, ATI has used it to create a card that's got enough muscle to tackle even the most demanding of today's games. And even better - it'll do it without breaking the bank.

Sapphire's card is a cut down version of ATI's previous gaming behemoth, the Radeon X800 XT, albeit with a smaller price tag, and it uses ATI's X800 GTO chipset, allied with 256MB of memory. We set it against our current

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Best Buy card, the XFX GeForce 6600GT.

Its performance was impressive. We ran all of our tests at a 1280x1024 resolution - this is the native resolution used by most 17in and 19in TFT monitors. Half-Life 2 saw the Sapphire streak ahead of its rival, the XFX. With its graphics settings, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled, the X800 GTO ran at 43.69 frames per second (fps). The XFX trailed behind with a modest 26.95fps. Our second benchmark, Doom 3, traditionally works a little better with nVidia based cards, but the Sapphire, wth its ATI chipset, did itself proud. The Sapphire is a little slower in the standard test, but when we enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the same settings we used in the Half-Life 2 test, the Sapphire, with a score of 31.5fps, edged 2fps ahead of the XFX.

The Sapphire offers great performance in games for a reasonable price. The only thing it lacks that the XFX 6600GT has is support for Microsoft's latest graphics standard - Shader Model 3. This means you won't be able to make the most of games that support this standard. Until there are more Shader Model 3 games around, however, the X800 GTO is a top budget gaming card.