John Gillooly discovers that it's not just Britney Spears who is toxic.
But when you strap a giant orange cooler onto one side and a passive heatsink that looks more like scaffolding than anything else onto the other, you are pretty much locked into calling your close to flourescent product 'Toxic'.
This is exactly what Sapphire has done with its tweaked up RADEON X800 PRO card.
Based around the X800 Pro reference design, this card couples the large heatsink with a special software application that is called Automatic Performance Enhancement (APE) in order to run at higher clock speeds than standard, and do so without the need for the usual trial and error involved with overclocking. In order to get this up and running all you need to do is first install the card and latest CATALYST drivers and then install Sapphire's APE application. There is no interface for the software, it cranks the clocks up on install and off you go. To disable APE just uninstall it.
This ease of use is amazingly refreshing, but what does it actually do? Normally the X800 PRO's core clock is 475MHz and its memory clock is 450MHz (900MHz effective). With APE enabled the core stays the same but memory jumps to 520MHz (1.04GHz effective). This is a great leap in speeds, but modern graphics accelerators are finely balanced machines, and just cranking up memory clocks does not necessarily mean anything, especially without a concurrent raise in core clock. So, in order to test the effectiveness of APE we ran it up on our Athlon 64 3200+ testbench, comparing scores with and without the application installed.
While the Toxic card did manage to deliver higher scores with APE enabled in all the tests, the results teetered on the wrong side of insignificance. In the tests that delivered framerate results, the largest difference seen was only 3fps, while in 3DMark03 the gap was a touch over 300 3DMarks, which is a moral victory at best.
The X800 PRO is a damn respectable 12 pipeline graphics card, and worthy in its own right, so just because the automatic overclocking doesn't deliver a mindblowing boost it doesn't make it a poor performer overall. In the end it comes down to a simple question of sacrifice. For those three extra frames you effectively lose two PCI slots, and the colour scheme is somewhat garish. You do get a card with good cooling and overclocking potential, and a decent games bundle of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but it's all down to a matter of personal choice as to whether this is preferred over other models of X800 PRO.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012