Radeon X800 XL Roundup

Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL 256MB

Supplier: Sapphire
Price: £211.49 (Source: Scan)
Availability: Now
Default Core Clock: 400MHz
Default Memory Clock: 1000MHz

There are many of ATI's board partners that do not manufacture the cards that they sell, and nor do they have the facility to do so – this is where Sapphire come in to play. Along with manufacturing enough video cards to satisfy their own demands for their Hybrid and Toxic lines of products, they manufacture a large portion of video cards for ATI and its board partners. They are ATI's largest board partner worldwide, selling over 50% of all ATI-based video cards.

Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X800 XL is different to the other two implementations that we have already examined here, both in appearance and in its feature set. The first thing that is immediately apparent is the colour of the PCB – it's a dark shade of turquoise instead of the more familiar red PCB. Sapphire have opted out of adding an extra power connector to the video card, so it draws all of its power from the PCI-Express x16 slot.

The cooler is a relatively familiar design, but the fan in particular is not to our liking. The base of the heatsink is constructed in copper, using a large number of copper fins to increase the surface area. The fan is the noisiest in this group test, and it was the only one that spun up during overclocking. The fan seems to be inefficient, while the fins are not what we would refer to as aerodynamic – they're straight fins that have 'no angle of attack', so to speak. The heatsink design is actually very similar to the second revision X700 XT cooler, which had complaints about its thermal control.

The memory on the back of this video card has small heatsinks on – the other two cards do not require active cooling, and the BGA chips on the top of the card are not directly cooled by the cooler on the core. The card uses Samsung's 2.0ns, 500MHz (1000MHz DDR) GDDR3 memory chips – a little slower than the chips used on both Club3D and MSI's implementations.

There is no VIVO included on this card, so this card will not appeal to the avid video editors out there. The back plate has the more familiar VGA, DVI and TV-Out connections. The choice of which connections to use on the back plate is a tough decision, Sapphire have chosen to still cater for the CRT users that are still out there. Depending on what country you are in, the back plate connections may well be slightly different from the ones that are on this version of the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL.

The bundle is a fairly impressive one, with two full game titles included - there is Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow DVD Edition and Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. Along with the game titles, the bundle comes with the expected DVD Player under the guise of CyberLink's PowerDVD 5. There is also the driver CD and Sapphire's overclocking tool, known as Redline. There are a number of cables included with the bundle of extras, including an RCA composite cable, an S-Video cable, a 7-pin S-Video to HDTV cable and an S-Video to Component adapter. Along with these, there is also an unbranded DVI to VGA converter and a Sapphire case badge.