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Sapphire includes all of the complementary hardware you need, including a power extension, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and an S-Video-to-composite adapter for output to a television.
79% Rating: 
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Sapphire Radeon 9800XT |
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Sapphire's Take on Pricing, and 3DMark03
Keeping in mind that online prices are highly volatile and fluctuate on
almost a daily basis, Sapphire's RADEON 9800 XT 256MB runs about $450USD
($600CDN) dollars. That is, it costs $10 dollars more than VisionTek's 9800 XT card,
which doesn't include the Tomb Raider game.
Compared to its primary competition from NVIDIA, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 256MB,
Sapphire's RADEON 9800 XT is a bit pricy. The flagship NVIDIA card
goes for about $415USD dollars online. But then again, if you're looking for
top performance, an extra $35 might not make a difference. And when you
consider the price you'd otherwise have to pay for Half-Life 2 and Tomb Raider,
Sapphire's offering can be decidedly more attractive.
Now for the benchmarks!
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| PCStats Test System Specs: |
| processor: |
intel pentium 4 3.2 (800mhz) |
| clock
speed: |
16 x 200 mhz = 3.2 ghz |
| motherboard: |
aopen ax4c max (intel 875p/ich5-r) |
| videocard: |
sapphire radeon 9800 xt 256mb (catalyst 3.9)
ati radeon 9800 pro 128mb
reference (catalyst 3.9)
nvidia geforce fx 5950 ultra 256mb (detonator
52.16)
nvidia geforce fx 5900 ultra 256mb (detonator 52.16) |
| memory: |
1gb corsair twinx1024-3200llpro ddr400 |
| hard
drive: |
ibm 30gb 7200rpm p-ata hdd |
| cdrom: |
nec 52x cd-rom |
| powersupply: |
vantec stealth 470w |
| software setup |
windows xp professional with sp1
directx 9.0b |
| benchmarks |
futuremark 3d mark03 v.340
quake iii: arena v.1.32 'four' Demo
Unreal
Tournament 2003 Demo
Comanche 4
X2: The Threat Rolling
Demo
SPECviewperf 7.1 | |
Perhaps the most controversial 3D benchmark in service, 3D Mark03 has a
sordid past. The most common complaint against 3D Mark03 is its pertinence to
real world gaming. Given the scarcity of DirectX 9 applications, however, 3D
Mark03 continues to prove useful as a predictor of performance.
The latest patch provided by Futuremark incorporates several official
improvements, including a modification to the maximum size of a point sprite and
detection of Hyper-Threading technology. But as the benchmarks show, it also has
a profound effect on the performance of the GeForce FX family, purportedly by
defeating the optimizations instated by NVIDIA's shader optimization
compiler.
This new accurate diagnostic tool, designed for
DirectX9.0, provides you with all the information you need to make informed
hardware assessments. Havok Total real-time physics library from Havok - these
routines are used to accurately model the movements of objects due to forces,
etc. FMOD sound library from Firelight Technologies - these are used for the
various sound effects and routines used in the tests. Graphics adapter analysis
software from Powerstrip of Entech Taiwan - this is used to correctly determine
the speeds of the graphics processing and video memory chips, plus supply
additional hardware information. Higher 3DMark03 scores denote better
performance.
| 3DMark03 Benchmark
Results |
| Video Card |
3DMarks |
Ranking |
| NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra |
5358 |
   |
| NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra |
5556 |
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| ATI Radeon 9800 Pro |
5751 |
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| Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 XT |
6466 |
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| Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 XT - O/C (471/404) |
7085 |
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The
result of the anti-optimization code is that ATI's RADEON 9800 XT dominates
its nearest competition by more than 16 percent. Even the older RADEON 9800
Pro bests NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The fact
of the matter is that the most popular games will be optimized for NVIDIA's
architecture, while the others may indeed resemble the scores set forth here.
Depending on your game library, this may or may not be an influential
factor on your next graphics card purchase.
In other words, the 3DMark03 results don't translate into
the real world very well, if at all.
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Futuremark 3DMark03
(v.340) 
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