Sapphire, well-known as a long standing ATi partner and supplier of quality graphics, recently started shipping units of their X1800GTO² graphics cards to world-wide outlets.

Sapphire introduced the GTO² line with their X800 boards. The GTO² brand is popular with hardware enthusiasts thanks to its price, overclocking, and its high potential for unlocking extra pipelines. Many X800GTO² cards were actually X850XT PEs with better memory in disguise. All you have to do to convert your X800GTO² into a very powerful X850XT PE, is to simply use a BIOS mod. At this point, we don’t know much about the possible hidden performance of this card but we'll let you know as soon as we get our hands on a sample to torture.

We can confirm that this is a PCI Express card with 512Mb of RAM (256bit) and has VIVO capabilities. According to our sources, the price is going to be around to $200-300.

You can read an early article with a round up of cards including this one over at the google translator.

The original French version is here - Ooh La La!