Origins of the card

The Sapphire card up close

Sapphire X800 XT poses with ATI RADEON X800 XT PE reference card

Shortly after X800 PROs appeared on store shelves, an interesting second X800 PRO SKU began to appear from some board manufacturers: X800 PRO VIVO. These cards were based on the same 12 pipe configuration as other X800 PROs, with the sole addition being VIVO support.

On the surface, this looks like a minor difference, but slowly but surely an increasing number of users began to report that they were successfully able to turn on all 16 pipelines in their X800 PRO VIVO card: it was like getting an X800 XT for only about $400! All that was necessary to do this was a simple BIOS upgrade, and BAM, your X800 PRO card was running with all 16 pipes up and running, just like the RADEON 9500 vanilla-to-RADEON 9700 mod from a few years ago.

Size comparison between the ATI and Sapphire cards

Besides the sticker no real difference in cards

If you recall the design of the X800’s R420 graphics core, all X800s are based on the same core, whether it’s a 12-pipe X800 PRO or 16-pipe X800 XT Platinum Edition. The pixel pipelines in X800 are arranged in a quad pipeline configuration, with each quad consisting of four pixel pipelines. ATI merely disables one of the quads for X800 PRO (3 quads x 4 pipelines per quad), while X800 XT and X800 XT Platinum Edition have all four quads turned on (4 quads x 4 pipelines per quad).

Making matters even more enticing was the fact that many of these X800 PRO VIVO cards were shipping with high-speed 1.6ns Samsung GDDR3 memory modules. These are the same modules ATI uses on X800 XT Platinum Edition. Sapphire’s X800 PRO VIVO was one of the most popular examples end users had success with finding 1.6ns memory.

As word spread about these cards, ATI and their board partners did little to stop things. After all, these cards sold for a little more than X800 PROs without VIVO and ATI didn’t have X800 XT Platinum Edition shipping in bulk to offer as an alternative; X800 PRO VIVO was essentially the high-end offering.

More importantly, the presence of X800 PRO VIVO also kept users from purchasing GeForce 6800 GT cards and, for whatever reason, they weren’t quite up to snuff to be sold as X800 XT Platinum Edition cards anyway.

It now appears that ATI has decided to take these cards and sell them as X800 XTs. After all, thanks to its higher clocks and 16 pipes, the X800 XT commands a premium over X800 PRO. This allows ATI and their board partners to improve their margins at the high-end, as these same cards that were once selling for a little over $400, can now be sold as $450+ X800 XT AGPs. That’s our theory on the whole matter at least; we haven’t received confirmation on any of this from ATI or any of their board partners, nor do we expect them to (especially when it comes to overclocking). But we get more confirmation of our theory when taking a closer look at the Sapphire X800 XT board.