ATI has been the dominant force in the desktop market for quite some time now, which can mainly be put down to successful product refreshes ever since the 9700 Pro. Since then each next-generation release from ATI has been more than competitive to the Nvidia offerings. Nvidia has tried hard to get back on top, with recent reports suggesting that they are now gaining a significant desktop market share. This most likely started with the release of NV43 and has carried on ever since. Nvidia have been doing a lot right lately, like announcing new cards which are available to buy almost immediately in the retail channel, and it’s now ATI who’s playing catch up. Surprisingly, it was the 6600 GT that really put Nvidia back on top, and ATI had nothing for several months to combat what arguably was the most successful card of 2004.

Now, ATI is back on track. It’s finally sorted out the X1000 series logic gate bug which delayed the cards release by 6 months and it’s now ready to take on Nvidia from all directions. This neatly brings us to the X800 GTO, which uses the R4xx SKU to compete with Nvidia’s mid-range offerings.

We recently reviewed the Sapphire X800 GTO Ultimate which is a passively cooled X800 GTO and the performance numbers where impressive, especially when overclocked. Today we will be looking at another X800 GTO but this time it’s from Connect3D. There are a few differences between them, not just the coolers. Anyhow, we’ll get to that later.

For now, it’s important you take on board that one of the key selling points for us “in-the-know” types will be the overclocking performance of these reasonably priced R4xx X800 GTO’s

Looking at the table above you can see how closely matched the GTO is to some of ATI’s higher-end offerings. It’s technically possible to reach X850 Pro speeds with this card, and I’m not going to leave you in suspense, this card did reach those clocks and the performance increase is spectacular. You should also note that the X800 GTO has an R4xx core, which means you are not guaranteed a specific core like R480, it could be an R430. An R430 is identical to R480 except it didn’t qualify for R480 binning. It may be that it could not reach the necessary 520 MHz core clock, or that one quad of the vertex pipes is defunct, leaving ATI with no choice but to downgrade the core and disable 4 pixel pipes making it a 12 pipe SKU - R430.

There has been a lot of fuss over X800 GTO’s being moddable to 16 pipes, essentially bringing the performance of a £120 card within reach of the X850XT PE, which is the daddy of all R480 cards . In this review I will not be attempting this bios mod as it is by no means guaranteed to work. Your X800 GTO must have an R480 core and as you can end up with R430’s I don’t think something as risky as this should influence a review. If you like the idea of modding to 16 pipes you should look at the X800 GTO2 , of which is of limited supply and only sold by Sapphire, so you best hurry up! I’ll also add that not all the R480 cores are moddable either; you should visit here to discover if yours is likely to be moddable.