I have a special treat for you all today... Let me build up to why. Years ago the Intel Celeron 300A reigned supreme as the overclocker's crown jewel since it had the uncanny and unmatched ability to easily overclock to 450+MHz speeds. That may not sound like much to you PC n00bs today but back then it was big news. Comparable to a 2GHz CPU hitting 3+GHz on moderate air cooling. The overclock yielded at least a 50% improvement which was a monumental feat considering that the CPU was priced hundreds of dollars cheaper than even the fastest stock CPU on the market which wasn't even as fast as the overclocked Celeron 300A. Before too long the Celeron 300A was nearly impossible to get ahold of since every overclocker was scrambling to get one. From time to time a product comes out which is soon discovered to hold hidden potential... whether it be a simple overclock (Intel Northwood 1.8GHz), an easy bios flash (9800 Pro to 9800 XT), or maybe even a quick solder (or using the "Pencil Trick" on the old AMD T-Birds) these special products were able to run WAY out of spec with little to no fuss.

Today I have another outstanding product which is destined to stand alongside these other remarkeable pieces of hardware. The Sapphire X800 GTO2 was modestly launched recently and not much hooplah had surrounded the card until it's secret was discovered. The X800 GTO2 is a 12 pipeline 256MB video card much like the vanilla X800. What is very much un-like the vanilla X800 is that the X800 GTO2 doesn't run on the same ATI430 GPU. Instead, it runs on the ATI480 GPU. For the GPU model informed you will notice that is the same GPU core model used on the Sapphire X850 video cards which pack 16 pixel pipelines. The X800 GTO2 also has a PCI Express power connector whereas the vanilla X800 has no power connector at all. OK, so maybe the "secrets" of the X800 GTO2 aren't really all that secret. To those familiar with the regular layout of a 12 pipeline GPU card (me for instance) the card almost screams, "ABUSE ME! I can take it...". I will go into more detail on that in just a bit; but let's check out the retail package and card specs first.

Specs

Here are is a general summary of some of the Sapphire Xx00 line of cards in relation to their number of pipelines and their GPU and RAM speeds. You can see that the X800 GTO2 gets a hefty stock RAM speed bump over the vanilla X800. The key word here is "Stock". Anyone who purchases this card and leaves it as stock is committing a g33k sin as far as I am concerned... I will be backing that statement up very soon.

Here are the specs listed on the Sapphire for the GTO. Note that this is the GTO2 we are reviewing today. The two cards (GTO and GTO2) have the same stock settings but the GTO2 is pretty much designed to be unlocked. You won't find the GTO2 listed on the Sapphire website due to some contract stipulations from what I gather.