Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro vs. MSI Geforce FX 5800 Ultra

On our desk we had two top performing cards -- the Radeon 9800 PRO, the one that you can buy in shops, and the MSI Geforce FX 5800 Ultra, the rare bird NV30 marchitecture presented to the world almost six months back.

MSI will have extremely limited quantities of this cards and we believe that all of them where preordered from the start, so we believe it's not going to be easy to get one. Its FX 5800 Ultra is made by Flextronics -- that did not made MSI so happy as it used to produce its own cards, and cards for many partners. But the FX 5800 Ultra is an extremely complicated card that uses as many as 12 layers on the printed circuit board (PCB) that are not that easy to produced.

The MSI card is identical to every other FX 5800 Ultra card if/that you can get on the market and it uses the now Nvidia legendary FX flow -- of course with the MSI sticker over it.

MSI ships these cards in a nice, extremely huge box and it bundles some nice games, and software with it, to make it more attractive for potential customers.

The Sapphire card is also a reference child, since it looks exactly like the Radeon 9800 PRO from ATI, with the exception of a cooling solution since it uses slightly different fan with the Sapphire logo on. Sapphire has a nice game bundle as well and it bundles Redline tweak utility developed by the Rage3D boys that lets you do all sorts of tweaking and overclocking -- making this card quite attractive to enthusiasts.

Radeon is clocked at 375/337.5 MHz following ATI guidelines, and these days it's no big secret that Sapphire makes most of the cards for ATI and its Partners with only a few exceptions such as Tyan. But it always introduces reference based cards first and then introduces its own design with some advantages such as hardware temperature and fan monitoring. Sapphire also always supplies cables that you might need for connecting your card to a TV set.

MSI uses the biggest box that I ever seen a company use for a graphic card.

It includes - are you ready? A manual of course and S video cable as well as extension video cable and of course a power cable since this card need more power. DVI connector is something that's becoming usual these days. As for CDs you will get MSI Live VGA BIOS, MSI Live VGA Driver, MSI 3D!Turbo Experience!, MSI Media Center, MSI 5.1 Channel DVD Player, MSI 3D Desktop, Virtual Drive 7 Professional Version, Restore It 3 Professional Version, MSI Foreign Language Learning Machine, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project and MSI Games Collection (7-in-1 Lite Games ) and this sure is a nice pack of games.

Tests
We tested these boards on

AMD Athlon XP 2700+ FSB 333 MHz CPU
MSI Nforce 2 board
2 x 256 MB DDR 400
Western Digital 80 GB 7200 8MB cache drive
Pioneer Slot in DVD

Because we were testing in the heart of England and hadn't got the proper display, we just tested the cards on 1024x768 and 1280x1024 since the display we had couldn't take much more. Nor did we have our testing CDs with us as we were on a mission to get a visa from the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and the executives there didn't need those proofs.

During testing we had quite few crashes of the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra that we tested with 43.45 latest drivers available at time of testing, so it was not too stable, while the Sapphire Atlantis 9800 PRO was rock solid.

I don't need to remind you how noisy the Geforce FX 5800 Ultra is but we needed our ears syringing after listening to it.

In all the tests, the 9800 PRO dominated but the FX 5800 Ultra while it won the Mother Nature test, lagged overall.

Conclusion
MSI made a nice bundle around the card so if you by any means want a FX 5800 Ultra now this should be the card that you should highly consider. FX5800 was not so stable in all tests, but the temperature was at an acceptable rate. MSI FX 5800 Ultra is product without any future since it has been already discounted in favour of the NV35 based FX 5900 Ultra.

If you are a collector, have money or you are an Nvidia fan and don't mind the noise MSI Geforce FX5800 Ultra might not be so bad for you. These FX 5800 Ultra are going to be rare birds, collectibles.

Sapphire is the clear performance winner but it does not leaves Nvidia in dust which is exactly the same situation that I would expect from NV35 vs. Radeon 9800 PRO. Pricewise, Sapphire is at least €150 cheaper, quite a difference.

If you have TI 4600 in your home and desperately want to upgrade to Nvidia only and don't mind the noise when you play or work in 3D then the FX 5800 Ultra is for you. It might be a while until the NV35 ships, so think on.

ATI still holds the crown and Sapphire just proved that. If you want the fastest card, a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro is the one to go for right now.