agp-x800xl vs. 6800gt

[supraman]

Since when has Sapphire been losing their good name? I owned a Sapphire 9800 pro never gave me a lick of trouble. And I beat that card up real good.

I own a Sapphire 9800 Pro and it has been a pain in the ass from day one. It was only stable at AGP 8x when using a Nvidia chipset, ironic don't you think?

When I was trying to find a solution to the instability I found a lot of others with the same problem, almost all of them had Sapphire cards. Plus a lot of Sapphire cards (mostly 9800 series) fail when using after market heatsinks because the power management circuitry can't handle it.

[Madman]

I'd say GT, i have Chaintech 6800GT and I'm happy with it.

I was ablew to play FarCry with HDR @ my LCD's native 1280x1024 and 8xAF and frame rates were smooth enough 30+. Same goes for Splinter Cell demo.

Chronicles of riddick on the other hand have problems with 2.0++ path, as speed drops to 20FPS or so, but then again XL will newer run this part at all and afaik looses in 2.0 path too. Anyway I finished game first time on 2.0++ path and it was OK, and looked cool with soft shadows, now I decided to play on 2.0 path and it flies

Moreover I've seen cases where XL can't run some shaders because of hardware limitation (relief mapping) whereas GT can easily manage 80+FPS

Concerning AF and AA quality, AF was way higher on nvidia till FX series I think, then they sacrifised it because of frames per second battle.

Current implementations are pretty much equal and I have a feeling that otimizations might have been left on on NVIDIA if AF tests shows big difference.

BTW, are AF optimizations switchable on XL (color mip lavel stuff) now?

I'd recomend to be cautios with chaintech though, when i brought my card it was advertised as 350/1000 card, yet it turned out to be 350/900 card.
When I contected their tech-support, they did nothing but changed specs on their homepage, without even replying me... No more Chaintech for me...

[Vrock]

Plus a lot of Sapphire cards (mostly 9800 series) fail when using after market heatsinks because the power management circuitry can't handle it.

No kidding? Maybe that's what happened to my card. I had the Arctic Silencer on there. Hmmm.

[Alex]

Moved to System Builders Anonymous.

[steelcity_ballin]

Plus a lot of Sapphire cards (mostly 9800 series) fail when using after market heatsinks because the power management circuitry can't handle it.

No kidding? Maybe that's what happened to my card. I had the Arctic Silencer on there. Hmmm.

Had an actic silencer on my with 1.8 volts running thoruhg it , overclocked past xt speeds every day. Left my system on 24/7 never had a problem. I WAS using an nvidia chipset, as you cited may have been my good fortune.

[supraman]

I have had mine for a year, for most of that time it has had an ATI silencer 3 on it. It uses the XT PCB so it has beefier power circuitry, I think that's the reason it has lasted as long as it has.

I replaced the 9800 Pro with a 6800GT a few weeks ago after I bought San Andreas. The 9800 would keep locking up unless I used AGP 4x, even then VPU recover would keep pestering me. The 6800GT is a Leadtek and cost £200, the week after I got it, the price went down to £160 It was an easy choice considering the cheapest X800XL I could get was a Powercolour for £215. Stable gaming for the first time in a year