Introduction
SAPPHIRE Radeon X800 GTO² 256MB PCI-ExpressHot on the heels of the £110 Radeon X800 GT (8-pipeline, 475MHz/980MHz core/memory), and the £130 Radeon X800 GTO (12-pipeline, 400MHz/980MHz) cards, SAPPHIRE's launching yet another Radeon X800 video card. You'd think that it had the midrange ATI-based market sewn-up, with SKUs liberally dotted between £100-£180, However, SAPPHIRE's realised, right now, that there's still a large financial gap between its X800 GTO (£130) and X800 XL (£180) 256MB-equipped cards. That ~£50 price differential just opens the door enough for a 'new' SKU to be born, and to be exclusive to SAPPHIRE.
Now what could you engineer and market that fits in between these two products? Remember that the Radeon X800 XL is, in terms of performance, identical to the Radeon X800 GTO save for one important fact. It has a full four-quad (16-pipeline) rendering setup, whereas the GTO makes do with the same basic architecture but only runs with a three-quad, 12-pipeline setup. Inserting a performance SKU between the two seems difficult at first glance, but SAPPHIRE has come up with a product that does snuggle up between the two.
What we've got in review for today is SAPPHIRE's Radeon X800 GTO² 256MB card. Note the squared suffix? It's the all-important one. Read on to find out what the X800 GTO² is and just how well it performs.
