FiringSquad reviews Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP and X1950 Pro Ultimate PCIe video cards
For years ATI enthusiasts have been pleading with ATI and their board manufacturers to produce more specialized graphics cards with custom high-end features, much like NVIDIA and their board partners do with their video cards. Sapphire was one of the first ATI board partners to truly oblige, starting with the Radeon 9700 Pro generation with their Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Ultimate Edition. The Sapphire 9700 Pro Ultimate was the first graphics card to really emphasize silent heat pipe-based cooling (Abit introduced a line of heat pipe-based graphics cards around the same time as Sapphire, but their cards were by no means silent), a feature which had been available as an option for years in aftermarket coolers, but never before out-of-the-box from a large card manufacturer like Sapphire.
Sapphire's Ultimate line continued to evolve over the years as ATI introduced new GPUs, with Sapphire integrating newer heat pipe units from Zalman and eventually an external fan that operated nearly silently in the 9800 XT Ultimate, although eventually Sapphire had to abandon the heat pipe in favor of the more traditional heatsink/fan unit starting with the X800 line of GPUs. Meanwhile NVIDIA's board partners began to increasingly add additional features to their cards such as cards that were overclocked from the factory -- while Sapphire hasn't provided out-of-the-box overclocking with their cards, Sapphire did respond by providing their TRIXX utility, which would overclock the graphics card automatically once loaded; all while remaining under the factory Sapphire warranty...
[read more]
