Board analysis

Top of the Sapphire RADEON X800 XT card

The bottom of the card

As expected, Sapphire’s board design for the RADEON X800 XT mirrors ATI’s reference design. As we’ve mentioned numerous times in the past, on high-end $400+ graphics cards, both ATI and NVIDIA handle all board production. Card manufacturers like Sapphire then purchase the cards directly from them, affix their sticker and other materials in the card’s packaging, and sell it to the consumer. This is a bit ironic in the case of Sapphire, as ATI has previously outsourced all graphics card production to Sapphire’s parent company, PC Partner (Sapphire is the brand name for PC Partner’s retail business), meaning Sapphire was essentially handling all high-end board production.

See the size difference between the X800 XT and GeForce 6800 Ultra?

Heatsink on the Gigabyte card covers memory modules

Rage Theater chip provides VIVO

Because of this, the Sapphire X800 XT looks remarkably similar to the reference X800 XT Platinum Edition board we received a few months ago. You’ll notice the same fire engine red PCB that’s become ATI’s trademark, as well as the Rage Theater chip on the underside of the card. This chip is responsible for providing video input functionality. The yellow connector you see located underneath the Molex power connector is included for analog video capture. This feature provides convenient front panel access and is popular in Europe.

The aspect that will probably catch your eye though is the board’s memory: our Sapphire X800 XT card shipped with 1.6ns Samsung GDDR3 modules. Once again these are the same modules that ATI specifies for use with X800 XT Platinum Edition, and are rated for 600MHz by Samsung, so the board is over spec in this regard. In comparison, our PCI Express “Built By ATI” RADEON X800 XT shipped with 2.0ns modules, which are rated for 500MHz.

Samsung 1.6ns memory module

Theoretically the faster modules should gives us a little more room for overclocking.

Sapphire makes no changes to the rest of the board’s design. You’ll notice that Sapphire uses the same smaller copper heatsink that ATI has implemented on their X800 boards. We noticed that Taiwanese manufacturers ASUS and Gigabyte both use a slightly larger heatsink that also covers the board’s memory. The fan used is large, but fortunately it’s very quiet, and does a good job of keeping the R420 core cool.

Packaging

Sapphire includes a nice selection of goodies inside the board’s packaging. In addition to the card itself, Sapphire also bundles a component video cable for hooking the X800 XT to your HDTV, S-Video cable, a Molex power adapter/splitter, DVI-to-VGA adapter, and Video-In/Video-Out (VIVO) cable. Software accessories include Sapphire’s Redline overclocking utility, a basic driver CD, CyberLink PowerDVD 5 and PowerDirector 2.55VE, and the full versions of two games: Price of Persia: The Sands of Time, and the DVD-ROM version of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.