Introduction

Although Comdex was a little slow this year, we still managed to find quite a bit of newsworthy hardware. FIC’s small form-factor Athlon 64 system was one example and the dual-channel VIA KT400A was another.


Sapphire treated us to a different sort of surprise – an adaptation of the already-popular ATI RADEON 9700 PRO card that utilized a unique heat sink design, negating the need for a noisy fan. Dubbed the RADEON 9700 ATLANTIS PRO Ultimate Edition, Sapphire would be making the card its new flagship and shipping the board into the retail market within a matter of weeks.

Despite its end-all name (can you get any better than Ultimate?), Sapphire never claimed the card would offer tweaked core or memory frequencies. Rather, the ATLANTIS PRO Ultimate was designed specifically to appeal to the growing number of enthusiasts who would prefer silent running to a noisy rig. And it isn’t hard to see why. Nobody wants to watch a DVD on their PC with an 80mm fan pushing 85cfm in the background. Gaming isn’t nearly as fun when a case full of fans is louder than the game you’re playing. Though there will always be a market for powerful cooling devices, many would prefer to sacrifice some overclocking headroom in the interest of owning a PC that fits well in the living room or even in a bedroom. Aesthetics and acoustics both play important roles in this regard.

The Making of an Ultimate

Sapphire RADEON 9700 PRO Ultimate (Note: this image comes from our Comdex coverage)

The heatpipe on the final board isn't quite as long as the Comdex card

The Sapphire Ultimage features DVI and VGA connections, as well as an S-Video output

By now you’re familiar with the RADEON 9700 PRO and what it can do. You know that it trounces the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and excels especially in anti-aliased 3D rendering. More than likely, you also know the RADEON 9700 VPU consists of eight rendering pipelines, it is manufactured on a .15-micron process and is comprised of about 110 million transistors. Understandably, the core gets extremely hot running at 325MHz, so up until now, every add-in board partner has implemented some form of active cooling to maintain stability. The result is a careful balance between the size of the fan, the speed at which it spins, and consequently, the noise that is generated. Of course, this also means that the heat sink itself doesn’t need to be as large.