Introduction

Throughout our X800GTO Sapphire graphics cards article which we posted yesterday, we mentioned that the Limited Edition model was able to be unlocked to the full 16 pixel pipelines giving it potential to start running like a more expensive Radeon X850XT. This is all due to the fact that the X800GTO uses the same R480 core as the X850 series.

There is no guarantee you'll be able to unlock every X800GTO but the Sapphire X800GTO² Limited Edition is one which is showing a great success rate. Apparently other brand cards can be unlocked as well (such as Connect3D) but we haven't had the chance to test any others at this stage.

Well, we can say we had success with our review sample from Sapphire and today we will be looking at just how the pipeline mod is done and what kind of performance increase we see from it.

So without delaying we will get straight into a step by step look at unlocking the full potential of ATI's Radeon X800GTO in the flavor of the Sapphire X800GTO² Limited Edition and running it through our normal array of benchmarks to see what kind of performance increase we got from moving to 16 pipes from the original 12.

Let's get moddin'!