| Sapphire X800 XL |
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Going PCI-Express
There are pro's and con's in going PCI-Express for your video choice.
The Good:
Your board will be ready for future technology based on this architecture which
is gaining in popularity.
You will gain in performance in some applications and games.
You can say your rig sports the latest in technology.
The Bad:
You will pay a premium to have the latest in technology.
The performance difference as with any new technology is not that great over
AGP8x.
You will require a motherboard with a PCI-Express x16 slot.
All things being said it's usually a good move to upgrade to the latest in technology when its affordable to do so. AGP will be phased out of use and will end up much like PCI and ISA video cards in a few years. Going to a PCI-Express video card will require you have have a 939, 754, 478, or 775 based CPU and motherboard. As there are relatively few 478 or Socket A boards with a PCI-E x16 slot available it might be viewed as a waste of money to purchase a board with a PCI-E x16 slot and then be limited by the cpu.
Lets take a look at the card:
As you can see the X800XL uses a very small heatsink and the ram is covered by small aluminum individual heatsinks. We feared that heat might be a problem as well as noise from such a small fan. Both concerns were realized but with no affects to the performance. Its a shame to have such a wonderfully priced card with good performance that is runs a bit warm and that leans towards the noisy side. The ramsinks will run at a warm temp of 120F during gaming and the fan will increase in speed to keep the core cool during games. While this is usual it could have been avoided with a larger better performance heatsink. Upgrading of the heatsink by Sapphire would have doubtlessly increased the final price so there is a tradeoff. Neither the heat nor the noise was a large concern in the end.
Testing
All tests were done on the following system:
- Pentium 4 LGA 775 3.2GHZ clocked to 3.844Ghz
- Asus P5AD2-E Deluxe
- 1GB PC4200 DDR2 OCZ Platinum (Thanks to OCZ for supplying the RAM)
- 160GB Maxtor SATA
- Windows XP SP2
Benchmark Programs
Sisoft Sandra
3DMark03
3DMark05
Quake 3
Swat 4
On to the Tests
| « Introduction | Benchmarks » |