Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Sapphire "Hybrid" Radeon X800 XL on a DFI LANPARTY 925X-T2 Intel i925X chipset-based motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 560 3.6GHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults."  The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers, then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.

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Performance Comparisons With 3DMark05 Futuremark's Latest: Only Because You Asked For It

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October of 1998 and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of its audience with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

Throughout this review, we'll be comparing the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL to four other cards - a GeForce 6800 GT, a 6800 Ultra and two other Radeons, an X800 XT and an X850 XT Platinum Edition.  Please keep in mind that the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL's main competition is the GeForce 6800 GT.  The other cards have similar features, but they are clocked higher and are much more expensive.  We've included their benchmark results for reference only...

Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X800 XL performed very well in Futuremark's latest iteration of 3DMark.  With a score of 4721, the Sapphire X800 XL outperformed the GeForce 6800 GT by 150 points (3.2%), but as expected it couldn't quite catch the GeForce 6800 Ultra or either of the higher-end Radeons.  Considering the Sapphire card's price though, its performance is excellent.