X800 Xl Views
I had previously reviewed the standard Sapphire X800 XL, and it proved to be quite a solid product in terms of overall performance and price. In fact, at the $299 price point, it is probably the best deal around. It is significantly faster than the more expensive X800 Pro, and most often it is able to compete quite favorably with the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT.
The X800 XL is a 16 pixel pipeline chip with 6 vertex shaders. This chip is made on TSMC
Sapphire took the basic X800 XL design and added a couple of nice touches. The first is that the PCB is blue as compared to the standard red PCB that ATI based products usually have. The second is that they placed ramsinks on every piece of memory on the board. If you remember from my previous X800 XL review, ramsinks were only applied to
The standard cooler that is usually supplied with the X800 XL is a solid affair, but it starts to get fairly loud when it hops up to 66% speed. Once 100% speed is reached it becomes a very annoying. Now, while it rarely went up to 100% for me in the lab, in warmer climates it could quite often hit that magic number. The Zalman cooler, with its large fan, spins at one speed all the time (at least as far as I noticed). This keeps the chip very cool all of the time. Once games start running, the back of the board behind the GPU never gets warm to the touch.
X800 Xl Images
