At the launch of Intel's latest 915 and 925 chipsets, the only PCI-Express graphics cards to be found were low-end and medium mainstream cards, and indeed we were told it would be sometime before any high-end cards would surface, so it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that Sapphire has launched one into the market place so soon.

What's even more of a surprise is to find that it's based on ATI's Radeon X800 XT, which even in its AGP guise is a rare and expensive beast.

As Sapphire is a long-time ATI partner it comes as less of a surprise to find the card identical in appearance to the default ATI design, even down to the red PCB (the board we looked at was an early example; the retail boards should have blue PCBs), with just a change in graphics on the large heatsink that dominates the front of the card.

Since the card uses 250MB of DDR3 memory there is no need for any dedicated heatsinks for the memory, as DDR3 runs cooler than either DDR1 or 2. Therefore there is no heatsink on the rear of the card.

Apart from the PCI-E interface the card is generally the same as the AGP version. Based on the RC423 0.13 micron core, it has sixteen parallel pixel pipelines and six pixel shader pipelines, a core speed of 500MHz and a memory speed of 500MHz DDR (1GB).

The only other difference between the cards is the power connector. PCI-E cards use a special 6-pin connector instead of the 4-pin Molex connector of the AGP version. Thankfully Sapphire supplies the card with a 6-pin PCI-E to 4-pin Molex power connector which, unless you have just recently bought a very up-to-date power supply, you will not have.

You won't be disappointed with the performance of the card. When tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels with 32-bit colour, it gave a 3DMark03 result of 12,032 and a FarCry frame rate of 73fps. Even at 1,600 x 1,200 it gave a score of 4,364 for 3DMark and a playable 37fps for FarCry.

Apart from all the usual cables and driver CD in the box, Sapphire also bundle two full games with the card; Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. You also get full versions of CyberLink's PowerDVD 5 DVD player and PowerDirector VE 2.5 video editing software.

Yes it is expensive, but then if you want a card to play all of today's games at high resolutions (and many of tomorrow's) and still have full playability then this is the card for you.