Sapphire Radeon 9800XT Options

[Paul]

SOMEWHAT UNSPOOKILY, the first firm to retail with a Radeon 9800XT is Sapphire, the card maker that produces all - or at least most - of these cards for ATi. The brand was created by two people - Dasha Forster (the one that sells) and Brian Skelton (the one that messes with the press) - both veterans of computer graphics, as Dasha used to work for ATI and Brian used to work for 3DFX and later for Power 3D - an Nvidia partner that simply could not deliver what it was preaching, a water-cooled Geforce 3.

Things have gotten complicated for ATI partners since Asus just jumped in to rock the gondola but we believe things will become even more complicated in the future. More will tie up with both Nvidia and ATI, though this can't be a bad thing for the consumer.

Still, that's something of an irrelevance to Sapphire, at least for now, since they will get a nickel from each and every card anyone sells since they made them all, even if they are blue. In the last week of October a first Sapphiric samples emerged and the first shops got a sprinkling of Radeon 9800XT in stock and we had the opportunity to play with one of those.

The Radeon 9800XT is what ATI wants to position against Geforce FX 5950 Ultra, which is clocked at 475 core and 950 MHz memory. ATi's card runs at an unusual 412 MHz - to fit into Dell's heat recommendation gloves, we learned - while its memory rocks at 730 MHz. This time ATI used DDR 1 since it does not get as warm as its younger brother DDR II - the one that didn’t have much luck in graphics so far.

The Radeon 9800 PRO 256 MB DDR II version was clocked at 380 MHz core and 700 MHz memory so we cannot consider that Radeon 9800 XT a huge step forward with just 32MHz faster core and 30MHz faster memory. In Nvidia's case, the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra is 25 MHz faster while the memory hums along at 50 MHz faster, which shows that there's not much space for huge performance and clock jumps this time around. It is simply time to relax and get what you can until NV40 and R420 tip up.

View: Full Review



Source: The inquirer

[wizard james]

i want i want i want. ....relly badly

[usr.c]