Sapphire Radeon X800

A nice boxed Radeon X800 that I bought new in 2005 as an upgrade to my XFX GeForce FX 5600. A decent upgrade although the X800 by far wasn't the fastest card out there. The Radeon X800 Pro and GeForce 6800 had quite a bit more oomph and both the Radeon X850 XT PE and GeForce 6800 Ultra could deliver twice as much performance in demanding games.

I used to run this card with the standard heatsink/fan solution. In a lab-environment the cooling works fine but in practical terms they are often a bit under dimensioned: the narrow fins of the heatsink easily acquire dust and after a year the cooling gets sub-par causing the fan to spin faster and thus louder... I found the solution in installing a Zalman VF700 fan solution.

This card was manufactured in the time-frame that PCI Express (PCI-e) was new. ATI engineered their chip to work with PCI-e and used an PCI-e to AGP bridge.