ATI Graphics Card Buyer's Guide 2006, Part II

Sapphire Radeon X1800 XT OC

As with other models, while Sapphire may put stickers with its logo on the cooler and the fan, the hardware follows ATI's reference design. The massive cooler covers both the graphics processor and the memory. Warm exhaust air is pushed out of the case through the ATX shield at the back of the card. Due to the cooler's size and weight, the card takes up two expansion slots and requires secure mounting.

Our review sample achieved very good performance results, which is due to the fact that Sapphire ships this card with higher default clock speeds. The retail box does not quote any specifications in this respect, but the frequencies are identical to those of the HIS card (tested in Part 1 of this guide), meaning 700 MHz for the GPU and 1.6 GHz for the memory. The board supports Pixel Shader 3 as well as HDR rendering with simultaneous anti-aliasing. The XT is the fastest of the X1800 chips, and offers sufficient performance for complex 3D games.

Sapphire's Radeon X1800 XT OC features two digital DVI signal outputs and an HDTV / S-Video connector.

The card ships with HDTV, S-Video and RCA cables, as well as Vivo cables for video input and output. Sapphire bundles Power DVD 5 2ch as the card's software DVD player. An auxiliary power cable is also included in the box, and a DVI-to-VGA adapter allows the card to be used with an analog display.