Radeon X800 GT Roundup

Sapphire Hybrid X800 GT

Default Core Speed: 473MHz
Default Memory Speed: 986MHz

Sapphire's Radeon X800 GT is slightly different from the previous two cards, in that it uses a dark green/blue PCB, much like their Hybrid Radeon X800 XL solution. However, there have been a couple of subtle changes to the design of both the PCB and the cooling. The main cooling solution is exactly the same as Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X800 XL, with the exception of the sticker, but there are no heatsinks covering the memory on the rear this time around.

Much like HIS, Sapphire are using the R423 GPU for this Radeon X800 GT. However, we're unsure whether any of their cards may contain R480 GPUs at any stage. Ultimately, it is possible that they could pop up at some point in time depending on how many dysfunctional R423 GPUs there are to go around.

The cooler is a relatively familiar design but, as we have mentioned previously, the fan is not the best around. The base of the heatsink is constructed in copper, using a large number of copper fins to increase the surface area. As with our Radeon X800 XL Roundup, the fan is the noisiest in this group test. As we stated in that review, the heatsink design is a very similar design to the second revision X700 XT cooler, which had problems with its thermal control.

In the top left corner of the PCB, there are some slight differences to the Radeon X800 XL PCB - the capacitors are a new design that is actually a much lower profile than was used on the X800 XL - it makes the X800 GT's PCB look a little neater than the XL's. The other subtle difference is that there's a PAL/NTSC jumper for switching the TV-Out mode on the card - an interesting addition.

The back plate features DVI, D-Sub VGA and TV-Out - we've already mentioned that the TV-Out port can be switched between PAL and NTSC. That means that Sapphire can sell the card in multiple regions without having to redesign the PCB to fit the region and will be of use to you if you have an imported TV. The cables that come with the card include Composite, S-Video and RGB while there's also a DVI to VGA adapter and TV-Out to Composite converter too.

There's still no sign of Sapphire Select, but Sapphire have included Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in the bundle. There's also a driver CD, a case badge, Power DVD 6 and an instruction manual - all pretty standard stuff these days.