ATI X800 GTO - HIS IceQ II Turbo vs Sapphire X800 GTO2

The HIS IceQ II Turbo is based off of the R480 core with a base clock speed of 400/490. However, the turbo edition of this card can go to 540/1.18ghz, matching the clock speed of the X850 XT PE, but not matching the pipelines. The overclocking utility provided does this quite easily.

The Sapphire X800 GTO2 (squared) also is based off of the R480 core and is clocked at 400/490(980). The 12 pipelines and an overclocking utility put the core up to X850 XT PE speeds quite easily, but the card is still at 12 pipelines. It can do quite a bit higher than these stock speeds, I was able to get it up to 600mhz core and 1.2Ghz memory, faster than the highest R480 core. However, the GTO2 offers some additional benefits as we shall see.

The true value of the cards comes out with the overclocking, the HIS card automatically improves 8% with some headroom to go a bit further. HIS states that it can go up to 540 and probably further. The Sapphire card performs great once you unlock it’s full potential with the extra four pipelines, as shown there is a massive increase in many cases, up to 50% in a few. Sapphire definitely has an edge with the unlocking ability.

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