Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL

Name: Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL - Page 12
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, February 21, 2005, 10:00 PM EDT

Overclocking The Sapphire "Hybrid" Radeon X800 XL

Making The Fast Even Faster...

Before we completed our testing, we spent a little time overclocking the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL using the latest version of Entech's PowerStrip software. Although, we could have overclocked the card just as easily with the included RedLine utility. We should note, however, that the RedLine utility did not work "right out of the box" because it would not recognize the X800 XL GPU. A quick trip to Sapphire's website to download the latest patch for the RedLine utility cleared things right up though...

After a little time and a little tweaking, we were able to hit a stable 442MHz core clock speed on the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL, and a 558MHz (1.11GHz) memory clock, with nary a visual artifact. Those are core and memory clock speed increases of 42MHz (10.5%) and 68MHz (13.8%). With the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of hi-resolution Aquamark and Doom 3 test and saw some nice performance improvements. In Aquamark 3, the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL's performance improved by about 7.2%, and in Doom 3 the card's framerate jumped by approximately 11.1%.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, Hybrid, SAP, X8, AP, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com