Where has the time gone; I swear it feels like it was only a year ago that I hooked up with Gary (GlitterKill) and Russ (DuckWarrior) at Comdex ’03, when actually it has been well over 2 years since that gathering. Spending the better of 5 days with 2 of this community’s biggest influences was very inspiring and during this visit to Comdex ’03 the three of us visited Sapphire in a Hotel Suite. Who would have known that meeting would start the relationship between Sapphire and PCApex; at the time we were PimpRig. Sapphire has had a partnership with ATI for over four years and hasn’t looked back; producing ATI graphic cards and mother boards based on the ATI chipset. Even though ATI doesn’t have a hold on the motherboard market they are still working on taking it to Nvidia.

As the Radeon X800 family and AGP technology come close to it’s extinction we are shown one last hoorah. With the AGP socket being superseded by PCI Express it’s no wonder what will happen to the AGP slot. The X800 line of R4xx cores is being depleted as we speak to make room for the new R5xx cores. Now don’t get me wrong, AGP is not going to just die off. With millions of PCs still using AGP, the technology is far from dead, but some of its limitations have already been realized. Sapphire has made a good move in the market for continuing the sales of AGP products and keeping the technology open for possible future upgrades; but don’t expect many more.

What Sapphire has brought to the table for the AGP market is their acclaimed Radeon X800 GTO. Unfortunately this is the plain version and not the GTO2 that can be unlocked. The X800 GTO cores are rated at 400MHz with 256MB of memory that comes stock-clocked at 490MHz.

Specs

Now for some details on this hot alien, please note that these are for the AGP ATI Radeon X800 GTO.

Alien Specs:

• Core: R423
• Silicon Process: 0,13µm low-k
• Transistor Count: 160 million
• Core frequency: 400 MHz
• Memory frequency: 490 MHz
• Pipelines: 12
• Vertex shader units: 6
• Peak memory bandwidth: 31, 36 GB/s
• Pixel fillrate: 4800
• Texel fillrate: 4800
• APIs: DX 9.0c, Shader Model 2.0b

Alien Details :

• 256MB GDDR3
• DirectX® 9 Support
• OpenGL Support
• 400MHz Engine Clock
• Memory Clock Speeds of 490MHz (256MB version), 350MHz (128MB version)
• FireBlade Edition offers possible memory clock speeds north of 560MHz (depending on system conditions)
• 256-bit memory interface
• Available in 256MB or 128MB models
• PCI Express / AGP (Standard 256MB X800 GTO)
• VGA + TV out + DVI
• 2048 x 1536 @ 85Hz (VGA)
• 1024 x 768 (TV out)