My new SAPPHIRE Radeon X850XT

After a year of himming and hawing I finally broke down and purchased myself a video card to go with my P4-3.4Ghz PC that I purchased around XMAS 2004. This is how cheap I am: Since I purchased my top of the line PC in 2004 I've been running a 16MB PCI video card on it. A brand new system with a piece of crap video card. Kind of defeats the purpose eh?Yeah...I'm cheap. I was holding out for something that would do video-in (for video editing) as well as have a top of the line chipset that could handle the latest game, all for under $200....Rrrrrrright.

I gave up on the video-in, since there are so many external solutions that you can purchase for under $100, and decided to go shopping for the best that money can buy with $200. Co-worker Mr. Alex Scoble pointed me to the massive selections out at NewEgg.com and we filtered our way down to what I considered the best for my needs, the SAPPHIRE Radeon X850XT. The best thing about the 850XT is that I satisfied my cheap "habit" with the low, low price of $164.00. Check out these specifications:

Chipset Manufacturer: ATI
GPU Radeon: X850XT
Core clock: 520MHz
PixelPipelines: 16
Memory Clock:1080MHz
Memory Size: 256MB
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Type: GDDR3

The specs are really impressive for less than $200! We couldn't find any NVidia cards that could compete in the price range that had 256MB memory, 16 pipelines, and have an interface of 256-bit. Sure the clock speed is not the fastest, but for my gaming needs I choose shading over speed which resulted in this card.

I received the card today and proceeded to install it as soon as I got home. Installation was quick and painless. In little to no time I had my long awaited dual monitors set up and was playing Call of Duty 2. With the game defaults I didn't see one pause on the first level. For the 2nd level I turned the dial from default to maximum EVERYTHING at 1024x768 which only caused occasional, very tiny pauses.

I'm happy. The SAPPHIRE Radeon X850XT from NewEgg.com has so far proven to be a good decision.