Final thoughts

Final thoughts

We were initially impressed with the launch of ATI's Radeon X800 GT SKU. The 256MB iteration set a new performance standard in the £100-£120 pricing bracket, and it gave the previous midrange champion, the GeForce 6600 GT 128MB, better than it got in return. Then, a short while afterwards, ATI announced another SKU. Titled Radeon X800 GTO and sporting a three-quad rendering setup that was slightly compromised by a lower core speed, it offered between 10-20% extra performance for little extra financial outlay. £120-£130, then, bought you true midrange performance that NVIDIA had a hard time coping with.

Another week passes and SAPPHIRE, one of ATI's add-in Board (AIB) partners, has created an exclusive SKU of its own, and one that seriously whets the appetite. Cutting right to the chase, SAPPHIRE's simply bought a large number of ATI's R480 cores (X850-class), used an identical PCB and component layout as found on Radeon X800 XL/XT/XT PE cards, and marketed this 'new' card as a Radeon X800 GTO² 256MB. The GTO² ships with the basic characteristics of an X800 GTO 256MB but that's where the similarity ends.

A quick BIOS flash unlocks the dormant rendering quad that's not available on regular 'GT/GTOs, and turns SAPPHIRE's GTO² into a full 16 fragment processor card. The enthusiast can then further gain by raising the card's mediocre 400MHz core and 980MHz clocks. All in all, with a little work, we can't see why a default SAPPHIRE X800 GTO² 256MB card won't function as, say, a Radeon X850 XT or even the XT PE version, thereby saving yourself up to £100 for a little work. Add in a couple of these cards, preferably unlocked and overclocked, in to ATI's soon-to-be-released CrossFire multi-GPU technology for some serious framerate fun.

Evaluated as a purely default card, the SAPPHIRE X800 GTO² 256MB doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's priced at around £20 above a number of X800 GTOs that offer the same out-of-the-box performance. However, with a BIOS flash and some sensible overclocking, £150, the asking price for the retail version which includes both SAPPHIRE's TriXX utility and the choice of a top gaming title, begins to look very cheap indeed. Highly recommended to those not averse to a little tinkering.