Conclusion

Some games or even specific maps will be able to take advantage of the additional memory on the Sapphire card.  I think we will see added memory (256mb) on VGA cards become increasingly popular depending on the demands of the games due out in the spring, i.e. Doom3 and Half Life2.  As of right now, I'm sure if we scratched around long enough we'd find a map that the 256mb card would excel at but that gets away from the point.  Overall, having that much memory on a card is a nice hedge on future games but for the time being, you money could be better spent. 

As far as the Sapphire card itself, it is a solid performer.  Our comparison card inched it out from a performance standpoint about everywhere.  The differences were only a few, a very few I may add, frames per second.  If you are married to ATi, the economically priced Sapphire 9600 XT won't disappoint you, the 128 or 256mb model, both would make a fine upgrade.  If you are looking for the best bang for your buck, the GeForce 5900 cards (128mb) can now be had for the same price as the 9600 XT which is something to thing about.  We will have to wait a bit longer to see what Doom3 and Half Life 2 will like best when it comes to performance, until then, save yourself a few buck on the extra memory.

Pros

• Fast

• Priced much more inexpensively than its direct competitors.

• Clean layout

• Overclocks nicely

Cons

• For the time being, the extra 128mb of RAM is not necessary.

• Inexpensive pricing comes at the cost of no memory cooling and plain Jane cooling for the core.

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Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - The Card
Page 3 - Benchmarks UT2003
Page 4 - Benchmarks Serious Sam, Code Creatures, RTCW, AquaMark
Page 5 - Max Quality and Overclocking
Page 6 - Conclusion 

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