Turning the card over we can see that the reference design is closely followed here also. The support for the heatsink is in the centre of the card and other than the stickers used the card is the same.

Connectivity is provided by 2 DVI ports and a video out which supports S-video, Composite and HDTV out as you would expect.

As with the ATI branded part the Sapphire X1800XT uses a 16 Pixel Shader processor chip, featuring an Ultra – Threading Dispatch processor and 4 Shader cores. There are also 8 Vertex Shader processors, 16 Texture Address units, 16 Texture units and 16 Render Back-to-Ends. The R520 core used is a 0.9micron part and clocks on our retail model were set to 631mhz core and 751mhz Memory.

ATI/Sapphire are using eight 64mb Samsung GDDR3 chips and they are connected to a 512bit memory bus.

The full feature set of the reference X1800XT is also retained here. You have support for Shader Model 3 and HDR lighting. In addition to this you can use HDR and AA at the same time (a current limitation of the GTX is that HDR +AA is not currently possible in most scenarios). Avivo is also supported here so excellent display quality is guaranteed regardless of whether you’re a gamer or a multimedia user.

Retail bundle

Sapphire's version of the X1800XT comes packaged in their usual informative box. On the front you have the essential information on the card (such as how much memory it has and the fact that it uses dual DVI). It’s also interesting to see that Sapphire are really pushing Crossfire on the packaging. Not only do you get a big crossfire logo (rather than any pic of the card) there is also a panel at the top of the box that explains what other components you need to set up the X1800XT in crossfire. The back of the box features a pic of the card and some additional information on the card specs.

Inside the box, as well as the card you find a plethora of connectors for the various forms of video in/out (including HDTV) and a converter which changes one of the DVI ports to a standard VGA. Additional cabling is provided in the form of a Molex to PCIe power connector.

Sapphires software bundle is very good also. You have Power director 3 and power DVD 6. In addition you get your driver CD and some free games. Sapphire have a quite unique way of providing your free games. The CD included feature four games which you can play for a limited time. You then choose whichever two are your favorites.

The games to choose from here are Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within, Tony Hawks Underground 2, Richard Burns Rally and Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 which is an excellent selection.