Today we're looking at Sapphire's X850XT PE, or Platinum Edition. Not only that, but we'll be testing it in the AGP format since many of our readers have perfectly serviceable AGP motherboards and haven't felt the dire need to move on to PCI-Express as yet. So kick up your heels and relax as we take a tour of the latest and greatest offering from ATI in the form of the X850XT and we'll see how it compares to its smaller brother, the X800XT!

3DMark has been around for a while and has gone through several revisions over the years. While it used to be a good overall system benchmarking utility, its past two iterations have been pretty much just a test of graphics boards with overall system specs being unimportant to the scoring. It is, however, still a good test to make use of when looking at a new video board.

I will use the past three revisions of the benchmarking program to give as complete a picture as possible. Each version has been patched to its most recent release and testing was done using default settings.

Again, the differences are not breathtaking but each test shows an improvement over the X800 series board. Since the drivers and the base system are the same, the newer revision is showing an improvement in performance.