Sapphire Radeon X850XT PE AGP

First of all, I would like to thank Sapphire for providing the test sample.

Sapphire Technology has been around for over 10 years, striding to provide the best graphic card (and nowadays motherboard) solutions. It has a wide selection of ATI products, ranging all the way from the budget segment up to high end 3D accelerators. Sapphire is usually among the first to implement ATI’s new chips, and is not scared to experiment on its own, for example with its liquid-metal cooled BLIZZARD cards.

Today, we will take a look at Sapphire’s Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition for AGP. With nForce 4 for AMD and the i9XX chipsets for Intel, it seemed that the long era of AGP was over once and for all. However, about a year later, this is not quite the case, and many people still use AGP. Is there still some life left in the dying standard? Or would you be better off upgrading to PCI-Express right this minute? Read on to find out…

It has been quite a long time since ATI released its X850 series, and as the new X1K series have been introduced, I think a small overview will be quite useful:


Keep in mind that this table considers the AGP version of the card, not the PCI Express version.

With the introduction of the X1K series, it looks that ATI is retracing nVidia’s steps at cancelling out AGP. Only the low-end X1K series are officially announced for AGP (X1300 series). It remains to be seen if the X1600s will make it to AGP.

Architecture

As you can see, the card has 16 pixel pipelines (equal to the 6800's pipeline count, but 8 short of the number present on the 7800GTX), 6 vertex pipes and a 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface.