Overclocking
OverclockingSAPPHIRE's use of R480-based cores boded well for overclocking, especially in the light of the fact that, once flashed, its GTO² version ran with a full complement of fragment processors and used 1.6ns GDDR3 RAM.
After a sustained bout of tinkering, we managed a rock-solid overclock of 549MHz core and 1215MHz memory (effective). So by just flashing the card and raising clocks via an easy-to-use interface, we've turned what amounts to an ordinary ATI Radeon X800 GTO into an X850 XT PE-beater! Let's see how that panned out when we re-ran DOOM 3 and Far Cry, at the highest-tested setting of 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF.
As one would expect, the flashed, overclocked SAPPHIRE X800 GTO² 256MB is faster than a stock-clocked Radeon X850 XT 256MB. GeForce 7800 GTX simply owns the competition in DOOM 3.
Far Cry performance, however, paints a different picture, with the overclocked GTO² 256MB card fastest of all. It's over 62% faster than its out-of-the-box performance. DOOM 3 shows a greater improvement, though.
