This is the first video card in years that Legit Reviews has looked at that does not come with a game bundle.
What comes with the Sapphire X850XT video card:
Something else to note is that the X850 XT comes with the full size cooling solution that is found on the X850XT PE. To be specific the X850 XT?s 0.13-micron R480 core runs 120MHz faster than X800 XL, and only 20MHz slower than the X850 XT Platinum Edition. One of the tricks to get the high clock speeds found on these cards is the use of low-k black diamond dielectric.
The X850 XT we are reviewing today is built on the 0.13-micron process by TSMC. 11 micron technology, the X850 line is built upon the more mature. Curiously, while ATI’s X800 XL card is built upon the. People hoping for a huge performance boost in the X850 over the X800 will be disappointed as the difference in performance is very small (said to be less than 10%). ATI basically kept the same design with the X850 line as their X800 line, they simply decided to make the new X850 XT and PE’s more available by lowering the memory clock speeds, updating the core from the R423 that powered the X800 series, to the R480 for the X850 series, and implementing their best cooling solution yet. With more and more people jumping ship and embracing NVidia’s SLI technology, ATI was forced to release a high end card to protect it’s small market lead of NVidia. By setting the memory clocks so aggressively (575MHz), ATI was unable to secure enough memory chips that met the higher clock speeds to produce an adequate number of the cards. The main reason for this was fairly simple, ATI, while trying to get the most possible out of their cards, was overly aggressive with the memory clocks on the X800 XT PE cards. With the graphics industry beginning it’s migration to PCI-Express late last year, ATI’s high end PCI-E X800 XT PE cards were extremely hard to find. Today Legit Reviews will take a look at the Sapphire X850 XT, which happens to be the second fastest video card that ATI offers in their PCI-Express line.
All of the cards in the RADEON X850 series can use the CATALYST? Control Center and have up to 16 pipelines for gaming performance unlike anything seen years ago. The ATI X850 series consists of the usual suspects from ATI…the XL, Pro, XT, and XT Platinum Edition. In 2010, AMD, which bought ATI in 2006, stopped using the brand, ATI.In December of 2004, ATI released their next generation video cards, the X850 series. So, a video card with a memory chip running at 500 MHz would be referred to as having a 1 GHz memory. In order to make our table comparable to older chips, we still use the effective memory clock and not the real memory clock. In the past, manufacturers referred to the memory clocks with double (or quadruple) their real clock rate, because DDR and other technologies based on it (DDR2, GDDR3, etc.) allow the memory chip to transfer two data blocks per clock cycle, while GDDR5 memories allow the memory chip to transfer four data data blocks per clock cycle. It is important to note that beginning in 2007, both AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA started referring to the memory clock of their video cards with the real clock rate used. To facilitate knowing and understanding the differences among major AMD (ATI) chips, we have compiled the following table. With more and more graphics chips being released every day, it became very complicated for the user who does not follow the video card market to know the differences among all AMD (ATI) graphic chips on the market today.