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SapphireTech X600 Pro VIVO |
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Intro
The X800 Pro and X800 XT videocards have been on virtual store shelves for a little while now. The impressive performance that these cards deliver are well known now but that performance comes at a price. For an X800 Pro card you would need to pony up ~$400 - $500 and for the mac daddy XT version you are looking at ~$530 - $650. Today I will be taking a look at Sapphire Tech's X600 Pro. This 256MB PCIe videocard is the PCIe version of the 9600 and uses the RV380 GPU. The X600 Pro is currently available from various manufacturers for about $200 but all of these other cards only carry 128MB vs the 256MB on Sapphire's card. I have been told by the fine folks over at Sapphire that their X600 pro card will retail for about $195. Nothing wrong with doubling your competitor's memory for the same price! How about Video In/Out capabilities as well?
I will be benchmarking this card in various synthetic and real world tests and for comparison I will show you its performance vs a 9800 Pro and, in some tests, a 9700 Pro. With the newer ATI cores out and about the prices on the previous generation of cards are slowly coming down. The 9800 Pro is already attainable with the same $200 price tag in some cases. Is the X600 a good buy over the 9800 Pro? This is actually a bit of a moot point when you consider that the X600 Pro is a PCI Express card and the 9800 Pro is an AGP card. In fact, to date, I have not yet seen any 9800 Pro cards which have a PCIe interface. I don't expect to see one either. You will see why a little later. :)
Package
The package is as flashy and eye-catching as they come. I really liked the inclusion of the window on the back so you can take a peek at the card itself. If the extra 128MB over their competitors don't work then maybe the sexy, black PCB will. I'm sure that some (or even most) of you probably don't care what color the card is as long as it runs. Well, there are people who purchase gear based mostly on what color the hardware is... Yup, you heard me right. They buy gear that is a specific color so that they they can color coordinate their PC innards better.
The shwag you get inside the box includes VGA/S-Video cords and VIVO adapter, Manual, Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, PowerDVD, PowerDirector, Redline Overclocking Utility CD, and driver CD. I was impressed by the inclusion of the full versions of Prince of Persia and Pandora Tomorrow which are both very good games. The games are good choices since they are good programs to use for testing out your new DX9 capable vidcard. On a side note: Will you folks who publish these games forget the damn CD Emulation detection?! I personally have a central server I use at home that has ISOs of all of my purchased games and instead of messing with CDs (and possibly losing or damaging them in the process) I prefer to simply mount the ISOs across my network via a mapped drive. It make my life easier and makes my desk MUCH cleaner. If you are the shady type you can find a game crack that will remove that sort of protection so why even include it? The main people you are deterring from using your product are people like me with legit copies. *sigh* OK, now that I got that out let's continue...
