Sapphire X800XL AGP any good?

[8bit]

micovwar what dirvers are you running just now? Did you upgrade the bundled drivers from ATi.com?

If I have to stick to Sapphire's own branded drivers forever the card's going back. I want a card I can use the official vanilla Cat drivers with, don't want to be left waiting for bug fixes until Sapphire can get their backsides in gear.

[The Hand]

I might get one(Connect3d)...but i feel bad buying a card so close to the next generation of graphic chipsets coming out..
I think it would be a very short honey moon period!

[8bit]

hmm don't think so, I'm well impressed with mine, for 230 quid you can't go wrong with this card. Hand that mobo of yours is PCI-Express isn't it? you've got your pick of nice cards there... But I rate the x800xl very highly, put a couple in customer PC's now and had good feedback as well.

[8bit]

That board uses RIALTO. I've just finished an article that shows RIALTO doesn't hurt performance, compared to ATI's latest native AGP GPUs. And given that the X800 XL is such a performance bargain, it's highly recommended by me.

I took a look at Club3D's board. I can't see the Sapphire listed at Scan, but for the price I can see it selling for at MicroDirect, it looks to be great value. Highly recommended.

Hopefully we can publish my look at AGP X800 XL and AGP X850 XT PE very soon.

Nice one Rys, just read your article. Like it! Got the card now and am happily playing Lock On smoothly with most of its settings on high plus 6xAA and 8xAF at 1280 x 1024 x 32 with vertical synch on. I know not everyone's into flight sims but that game is just gorgeous at high settings now i can have all those settings with a playable framerate too w00t!

[StormPC]

They do well in the raw horsepower department also. See?:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8549066

Compare that to this 3GHz San Diego with X800 (XT or Pro, not sure which):



With 600MHz more and a double the cache advantage I can still beat him. Sure he's got stock video clocks probably but he's not running an XL. It's either a Pro or an XT according to the FM ORB. And my microATX rig is unmodded with stock cooling.