Although the transition to PCI Express is in full swing, the huge installed base of AGP equipped systems is still a major market that's continually being targeted by every major video card manufacturer. As proof of this, we present you with Sapphire's new AGP Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition. This card sports nearly the exact same feature set, and has its core and memory clocked at exactly the same speeds, as its PCI Express based counterpart. If you've got a system equipped with an AGP slot that is in need of a major video upgrade, but don't want to scrap your trusty motherboard that's served you well all this time, the Sapphire AGP Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition may just be in your future.  We ran this card though the gauntlet with a long list of games, and found it to be quite the performer. Read on and take a look, you won't be disappointed - we promise.

Sapphire's ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition (AGP 8X) Features & Specifications

ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition •_540MHz engine •_.13 micron copper low-k •_1.18GHz memory data rate •_256-bit memory interface •_256MB GDDR3 memory •_16 pixel pipes •_6 vertex pipes •_8.64 Gigapixel/second fill rate •_37.8 GB/s Peak Memory Bandwidth •_HYPER Z support for HD resolutions including Hierarchical Z, color and Z compression •_Hierarchical Z and Early Z •_Z Compression •_Fast Z Clear •_Z/Stencil Cache Six Vertex Engines •_Workstation class vertex processing power •_600 million polygon transforms per second •_5.7 billion vertex shader operations per second •_Workstation-class performance High-detail Geometry •_Designed for next-gen games with massive polygon counts •_Allows huge numbers of characters on screen at once •_High definition foliage and particle effects Smart Shader HD •_Long pixel shaders •_1536 instructions per pass •_High-detail geometry shaders •_Infinite length shaders (multipass via F-buffer) •_Single pass trig functions (Sine & Cosine) 3Dc Compression Technology •_Lossless Normal Map Compression •_4:1 Normal Map Compression technology

SmoothVision HD •_Sparse sample pattern AA with gamma correction •_Temporal AA (up to 12X effective) •_Centroid AA •_16X Anisotropic filtering with adaptive heuristics HyperZ HD •_Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including HDTV resolutions •_Lossless z-buffer compression (up to 48:1) •_Rejects up to 256 occluded pixels per clock •_Up to 32 Z/stencil operations/clock VideoShader HD •_High-quality video processing & acceleration •_Real-time user programmable video effects •_Video post processing and filtering •_MPEG 1, 2, 4 encode and decode acceleration •_FULLSTREAM Video Deblocking •_WMV9 decode acceleration •_High-quality resolution scaling •_Adaptive Per Pixel Deinterlacing •_Motion Compensation •_Noise removal filtering •_Display Rotation

Sapphire has been shipping their high-end video cards with a very comprehensive bundle of software and accessories. The bundle included with their Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition is no different. Included with the card, we found a basic user's manual, a driver CD-ROM, and an assortment of other discs that included copies of Cyberlink's PowerDVD and Sapphire's "RedLine" overclocking utility. A copy of Cyberlink's Power Director video editing suite was also included to compliment the card's video in / video out (ViVo) capabilities. In past reviews we've found Power Director to be quite useful and easy to use (see here). There were also two relatively new, full version games included, namely Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Both of these games currently sell for upwards of $30 each, so it was good to see them included, considering the hefty price this card commands.

There was also a collection of cables and adapters included with Sapphire's AGP Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition. There was a standard 6-ft S-Video cable included, a composite video cable, and a DVI-to-DB15 adapter along with a splitter for connecting the card to an HD-TV's components inputs, and another adapter equipped with S-Video and composite video inputs and outputs. Lastly, there was a molex power cable splitter included, with purple ends that match the color of the card's supplemental power connector.