The even bigger news though on this card is what lies within, that this card is not only highly overclockable out of the box but also can be modded. TechPowerUp have an article and broke the story on the ability to mod X800GTOs into basically an X850XT or even Platinum Edition. That's right, they don't feature 12 pixel pipelines but 16 and that is an R480 core underneath not R420. ATI do this because not every core comes out as guaranteed to run at the higher clock speeds or to have all pixel pipelines working.
With Sapphire's GTO2 Limited Edition, every card can be modded by flashing the BIOS to run at 16 pixel pipelines instead of 12 has worked correctly. And all the cards have some amazing overclockability, even with Sapphire's standard cooling. We were able to get the card to mod for 16 pixel pipelines and run the core at 520MHz and the 256MB of DDR3 memory at 590MHz. Past that of an X850XT and almost to X850XT PE levels, let alone the GTO speed of 400MHz for the core and 490MHz for the memory. With some additional cooling, one should be able to see X850XT PE levels but our system crashed so we hit something just above XT. As you'll see in the benchmarks, this obviously lends to a giant leap in performance.
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