SAPPHIRE RADEON X1800 XL 256MB & XFX GeForce 7800 GT 256MB Review

Both card packages offer compelling reasons for purchase and both are available immediately, but given a direct choice between the two, our money would slide over into XFX’s corner for a number of reasons. Its GeForce 7800 GT is marginally faster in a sector where framerates matter hugely. It also runs quieter, and, should you wish and funds/hardware permitting, can be put to immediate SLI use. That’s not to say that the SAPPHIRE X1800 XL is a bad card; it’s patently not, and it outscores the XFX GeForce 7800 GT on the features front, but priced at £300 it steps just a little too close to GeForce 7800 GTX money. We hope that ATI and its partners can release X1000-series CrossFire master cards in the very near future, as SAPPHIRE’s card is just crying out to be run in multi-GPU mode.

Despite the fact that the X1800XL was released after the 7800GT, the NVIDIA came out on top. It didn’t blow away the ATI, but it had other factors that warranted a purchase. Check out the full comparison at Hexus.