Introduction

Sapphire: card manufacturer extraordinaire

While ATI and ASUS’s brands are well known and recognized among most gamers and enthusiasts, Sapphire Technology is often overlooked. After all, Sapphire’s retail presence is only a couple of years old. But did you know that Sapphire’s shipments have topped over 1 million units/month and that they produce many of ATI and its board partners RADEON cards in their own factories? Officially, these cards are produced by their parent company, PC Partner.

9800 XTs up top, 5950 Ultra bottom

Some of 2003's more interesting coolers

High-end battle here

While PC Partner handles the OEM contracts, retail cards are sold directly to consumers under the Sapphire brand. So when you’re buying an ATI card, you’re technically purchasing a Sapphire board. With the most notable exception of ASUS, most of the first generation RADEON 9800 XT cards also come from Sapphire.

This is why many of these cards are so identical in feature set and board design; early cards are only differentiated by price, software bundle, and availability (support is another intangible – ed). Because of their unique position in board production, the latter category is another area where Sapphire excels -- Sapphire is always one of the first with retail cards available whenever ATI announces a new graphics core. Sapphire’s relationship with ATI has grown so close that Sapphire markets its own line of ALL-IN-WONDER cards outside of the North American market.

Sapphire logo up close

A closer look at the card

Both cards consume your PCI slot

However, rather than rest on their laurels, Sapphire has come up with some innovative cards of their own that go beyond their basic ATLANTIS line of video cards. Recognizing the limitations of ATI’s RADEON 9600 PRO, Sapphire produced a limited edition run of Fireblade boards that boasted support of memory clock speeds higher than ATI default: 660MHz in the case of the ATLANTIS RADEON 9600 PRO Fireblade Edition versus 600MHz in the stock RADEON 9600 PRO. Sapphire will be producing another Fireblade Edition for the RADEON 9600 XT.

At the top of the heap is Sapphire’s “ULTIMATE Edition” line. These cards fuse a RADEON graphics card with a Zalman ZM80-series heat pipe. The result is a graphics card that is completely silent, making it perfect for those of you who are looking to build a quiet gaming rig that still delivers outstanding performance.

Since we were first introduced to the ULTIMATE line just over a year ago, we’ve taken a look at Sapphire’s ULTIMATE 9700 PRO and RADEON 9800 PRO Ultimate Editions and found them to be excellent performers, equaling the performance of ATI’s best offering, but of course offering the unique trump card of silent operation. One unfortunate side affect of the heat pipe cooling however has been heat. Since the Ultimate cards have relied on passive cooling all the heat generated by the heat pipe and graphics core has nowhere to go, creating a huge hotspot within the PC.

For their RADEON 9800 XT ULTIMATE Edition, Sapphire has decided to address this. Let’s have a look shall we?