Board analysis

Top of the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT

Bottom of the card

With the Radeon X1950 Pro and Radeon X1950 GT using the same GPU, we expected Sapphire to use ATI’s reference X1950 Pro board design for their Radeon X1950 GT card. Surprisingly enough though, they didn’t, coming up with their own unique board design for this card.

The PCB itself is the same, measuring roughly 9” in length (the entire card is 9.5” long), and you can still spot the dual 12-bit CrossFire connectors located on the top left corner of the Radeon X1950 GT, but the rest of the board design is very different from the Radeon X1950 Pro.

Profile shot of the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT

VRM and power circuitry

PCB length of the X1950 Pro and X1950 GT is similar

One of the most notable differences between the Radeon X1950 Pro reference design and Sapphire’s X1950 GT is in power delivery. Power circuitry is completely new, you can actually see a bank of electrolytic capacitors flanking the board’s cooling. The 6-pin PCI Express power connector has also been moved from the middle of the board on the reference Radeon X1950 Pro board design to the upper corner on Sapphire’s X1950 GT.



The feature that stands out the most on Sapphire’s Radeon X1950 GT card though is its cooling. Saphire uses a ducted cooler, but it’s completely different than the heatsink/fan used on the Radeon X1950 Pro reference board. Sitting directly atop the RV570 GPU is a large all-copper heatsink. The copper heatsink is smaller than ATI’s however, measuring 3” in length and 3.1” in width. Flanking the heatsink is a large aluminum plate. This plate encompasses the majority of the cooling, resting directly above the memory modules and underneath the card’s fan.

The cooler up close

The fan itself is a blower style fan, and it’s actually slightly larger than the fan used on the Radeon X1950 Pro. It’s located offset of the graphics core in order to increase its effectiveness. Air passes into the fan and is then channeled through the blue plastic duct, passing over the aforementioned copper heatsink cooling the GPU before it finally exits out the right side of the cooler.

In practice, this system does a good job of keeping the graphics core cool, but it does so while generating an excessive amount of noise. The graphics card’s fan literally runs at full speed at all times. As it stands now, there’s no slow or intermediate setting for the fan, just 100%. So whether you’re gaming, browsing the Internet, watching a DVD movie, or even running the system in standby (sleep) mode, the fan continues to operate at full speed.

As you can imagine, this can get extremely irritating after just a few minutes of use, as the card’s fan can generate a lot of noise. Thankfully it isn’t GeForce FX 5800 Ultra loud, but it is considerably louder than any card we’ve tested recently, including the Radeon X1800 XT and X1900 XTX, which delivered a reputation for running notoriously loud.

Most of today’s graphics cards are equipped with variable speed fans, where the fan can dynamically adjust its RPMs based on usage or temperature. We’re crossing our fingers that this issue can be addressed at some point by Sapphire with a simple BIOS tweak, but as of right now this is an issue that seems to afflict their cards.

CrossFire connectors up close

Another shot of the X1950 GT

Accessories

Included inside the packaging of the Saphire X1950 GT card are two DVI adapters, a component video cable, S-Video cable, composite video cable, CrossFire cable, and power adapter. Sapphire also includes a copy of the game Just Cause on DVD-ROM, driver CD, and PowerDVD 6 2-channel edition.