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29 May 2006 |
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Sapphire X1800 GTO
Graphics
Card |
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With today's latest games
having bigger and better graphics, it reminds us of how important the
graphics card is as a component in our systems. If you wish to play the
latest and greatest graphic intensive games with quality, then it might
be necessary for you to consider upgrading your graphics card. Today,
we will be reviewing the Sapphire X1800 GTO graphics card. The X1800 is
part of Canadian company ATI's latest graphics cards series. The GTO
label means that this graphics card has been designed for value in mind
so that it is affordable, while still providing performance of the X1800
series. |
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The product box came in the usual packaging and look typical for
ATI-related products. The front of the box has small pictures
which quickly lists aspects of the product. The back of the box
lists a little more details of the technologies that the graphics card
supports. One thing that I noticed about the front of the box was
that you couldn't identify how much memory this graphics card has unless
you look at the small bubbles at the back of the box. |
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This product comes with the usual assortment of accessories as well as a
user guide and installation CD.
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A user guide, driver CD, Power DVD, and Power Director software is
included. The Power DVD and Power Director software is useful if
you want to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of the card.
The remaining disc contains several games: Richard Burns Rally, Tony
Hawks Underground 2, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, and Brother in
Arms: Road to Hill 30. These games are starting to become outdated
don't quite demonstrate the true power of the X1800 GTO graphics card.
It would be recommended for Sapphire to update these included games.
The way it works is that you get to try the games first on the disc each
for an hour. Then you get to select the game that you want to
unlock the full version of. The first one is free to unlock, but
if you are interested in unlocking the 2nd or 3rd game, you can receive
up to 25% of those games.
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When putting the graphics card in my hand, the weight of the card gave
me a sense of the power this card has. There is a large heatsink
at the front with an integrated fan to keep the air flowing within the
heatsink. There is nothing to see at the back of the card except
the support brace keeping the heatsink in place. This specific card
has 512MB of GDDR3 memory.with 12 pixel shaders. |
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The graphics card has two DVI ports and one S-Video port. The two
DVI ports allow you to plug in two monitors into the same card and allow
you to use two monitors at once. There is an included DVI to VGA
converter if you still use a VGA monitor. |
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All the typical accessories are included with this package. There
are two DVI to VGA converters, a power supply converter, as well as
various cables to take advantage of the S-Video port. |
-AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor
-1GB of DDR 3200 Memory
-Hitachi 250GB hard disk
-AsRock 939 Motherboard Dual-SATA2
-Windows XP Professional with SP2
-DirectX 9.0cFraps was used in certain portions of the games to
obtain the following numbers.
Please keep in mind that these numbers are all relative and vary
depending on the game. They are inteded to provide the reader with
a general idea of the performance they may see. |
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I began with the latest offering from Futuremark. |
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The important thing to note about Futuremark's 3DMark benchmarking
program is that it doesn't make sense to try and find any meaning behind
the numbers. The purpose to allow you to compare the potential
performance between two or more systems. |
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Need for Speed is a CPU intensive game which is why it wasn't surprising
to see similar framerates with or without antialiasing and anistropic
filtering on. At 1024 x 768 resolution, the gameplay was very
fluid and was all I could ask for in terms of performance. As the
resolution was increased, the decrease in gameplay smoothness was very
noticeable, but the game was still very playable. Even at
1600x1200, the game is still very playable and despite the slight
decrease in performance, many will appreciate the higher quality
graphics with antialiasing and anistropic filtering enabled. |
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Half-Life 2 was able to generally run smooth all around at any
resolution. When AA and AF were enabled, it really brought out the
beauty of the outdoor and indoor texture making them look realistic in a
sense. |
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Regarded by many independent reviewers as one of the best-looking RPG
games to date, Obilivion makes use of the latest HDR (High Dynamic
Range) lighting which can give objects a much more realistic and natural
look. It is also seen in Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast level.
The reason the framerates are lower even without AA/AF enabled is
because HDR lighting was enabled. When I turned on AA/AF, HDR is
disabled automatically. |
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Overall, when using this card, I found that enabling AA/AF shouldn't be
a problem with most games. They may decrease the framerates
noticeably, but slightly. This makes me realize how much more
efficient AA and AF are these days. With new technologies such as
HDR, there is still room to be come more efficient to have less of an
impact on framerates. Without AA/AF, games could ran at full high
quality settings without any problem, but with the power of this card,
you'll be inclined to take advantage of the card by enable AA/AF. |
Compared with higher end cards, this card was designed with a budget in
mind. This card offers fantastic performance and quality.
With this card, you can expect to be able to turn your graphics settings
to the max in games while being able to experiment quite a bit with
antialiasing and anistropic filtering. The package is fairly
complete with all the accessories, but could do better by updating the
included games in the retail box.
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Review by:
richard@digitalreviews.net |
