Sapphire launches two X800 GTOs

SAPPHIRE just jumped the gun on three graphic cards based on the new old core known as X800 GTO and surprisingly unlike other of ATI partners, will have two products based on this card. The other guys will present their X800 GTO cards tomorrow afternoon, BST time.

A normal Sapphire X800 GTO will use a 256 bit memory interface and twelve pipelines and the card is clocked at 400MHz core and 980MHz memory. Those will be the clock speeds for 256MB version. As Sapphire bundles its Trixx overclocking software, if your cooling is good you will be able to overclock this card to 520MHz core and 1000MHz memory or even higher. The card is cooled with a heatpipe cooler that you can see below.

The second card will use 128MB or 256 bit DDR 1 GBA memory, and it will be clocked at a 400MHz core and 700MHz memory. This card is expected to be much cheaper while it should be overclockable at 520MHz core and 760MHz memory.

The third card should be Sapphire exclusive and will be called the Sapphire Radeon X800GO Fireblade edition and this card will be equipped with dual slot fan cooling. It will have 256MB or 1.6 ns 256 bit GDDR3 memory clocked at 400MHz core and 980MHz memory but with Sapphire Trixx you will be able to raise the speed to 550MHz core and 1080MHz memory or even faster.

We learned that you will be able to use a special BIOS and that you will be able to get 16 pipelines up and running and at those speeds you might match the speeds of X850, interesting indeed and we will be soon able to tell you more about it.

All cards have VGA, SVIDEO and DVI out, and bundle includes Sapphires Select DVD where you can activate one of the games on DVD bundled with retail card, you will get Svideo cable, composite cable, DVI to VFA and 7Pin Svideo to HDTV cable. Cards should be available in next two weeks while samples are already finished.

The ultimate version of the X800GTO card pictured below will be passively cooled only and will provide some nice and quite environment for you. Cards are listed here and will cost you €180 in Germany or €200 in Austria as the tax is higher in this nice little country. µ