The success of the RV770 graphics processor (GPU) meant that partners of ATI could experiment with the design and come up with several products based on the GPU. The likes of Sapphire, HIS, PowerCOlor, Palit, HIS, etc., have already come up with numerrous non-reference designs, though all those designs had a common ATI designed PCB, with a primary PCB design with common layout of the various components, where the memory configurations and coolers used made all the difference. Sapphire has come up with a new non-reference PCB design for the Radeon HD 4850 that places components in a different way, perhaps it aides manufacturing and keeps the memory chips at a distance from the VRM circuitry enough to keep it cool enough to be passively cooled by a central cooler's air-flow? Whatever be the design methodology, Expreview pictured an upcoming Sapphire product based on this new PCB.

Following the introduction of the highly acclaimed HD 4800 series, SAPPHIRE Technology, the leading manufacturer and worldwide supplier of AMD/ATI based graphics solutions is now shipping two new models of HD 4850 providing a further choice of price:performance points for the enthusiast.

The new SAPPHIRE HD 4850 1GB is a new version of the HD 4850 designed by SAPPHIRE for the user who demands more memory for specific applications like rendering. It offers similar overall performance to the standard model, with clock speeds of 625MHz (core) and 993MHz (memory).

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 has been a success so far and Sapphire decides to expand their product range with Sapphire Radeon HD4850 1GB. Chinese website ITOCP released fresh pictures of this new card. It looks promising. This follows the release of pictures of the Toxic Radeon HD4850 we covered here.

The pictures show the card in the usual blue Sapphire PCB, and a heatsink covering in a similar fashion to that of some NVIDIA cards.

Fudzilla released the first pictures of an upcoming ATI Radeon HD4850 model from Sapphire, the Toxic Radeon HD4850. This card looks very familiar. It reminds us of the successful Radeon X1950 Pro custom-design by Sapphire using the familiar Zalman VF900-Cu cooler. It uses small aluminum heatsinks over the memory chips, a copper heatsink is used to cool the card's VRM. Expect this card to come with overclocked parameters.

SAPPHIRE Technology, industry leader in alternative cooling solutions for PC graphics, has just launched a new ULTIMATE Edition of the top of the range HD 3870 - topping it's previous claim for the fastest passive cooled graphics card in the World by delivering even more performance. The SAPPHIRE HD 3870 ULTIMATE Edition has 512MB of GDDR4 memory, running at 1125MHz (2.25GHz effective) and has a core clock speed of 775MHz, delivering the same exciting levels of graphics performance as the standard model - but featuring a totally fanless and silent four heatpipe cooler.

Following the introduction of the exciting new series of chipsets from AMD, SAPPHIRE Technology has just strengthened its mainboard offering with the introduction of two new products - the PI-AM2RS780G based on the AMD 780G chipset and the PC-AM2RX780 based on the AMD 770 chipset.

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced global availability of its exciting new HD 3870 TOXIC edition high performance graphics accelerator.The SAPPHIRE HD 3870 TOXIC version features the award winning - and SAPPHIRE exclusive -Vapor-X single slot cooler, SAPPHIRE's implementation of Vapour Chamber Technology (VCT). This advanced cooling solution provides more efficient and quieter cooling allowing the TOXIC edition to ship overclocked out of the box, and to allow enthusiasts even more scope for performance tuning. The single slot design allows the use of multiple cards in the latest CrossFireX configurations even where PCI-Express slots are sited closely together.

SAPPHIRE Technology, industry leader in graphics upgrades for the PC, has just launched a new version of its successful HD 3850 with enhanced memory configuration of 1GB.

The new SAPPHIRE HD 3850 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory, running at 829MHz (1.66GHz effective). It has a core clock speed of 703MHz, higher than the standard model, which together with the large onboard memory delivers exciting levels of graphics performance especially in games or applications where large volumes of texture or data are involved.

After Chinese New Year (that is, after February 11th) Sapphire Technology will start selling a Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card with factory water cooling setup, they call it "Atomic WaterCooled" and claim to offer ultra high performance. By the looks of it below, it first reminds me of the soon released CoolIT water block, secondly of the Leadtek WinFast PX8800 ULTRA Leviathan. In fact, if you look closely at the Leviathan card you'll notice they both use the same cooling unit, perhaps the difference comes in the water block design only. Pricing and clock speeds of the Atomic WaterCooled X2 are unknown at this stage.

Following the launch of its exciting new gaming portal, www.sapphireatomic.com - SAPPHIRE Technology introduces a new limited edition product under the SAPPHIRE ATOMIC brand.

Sapphire Technology Limited has just announced an exciting new way to bundle top software and games titles with its graphics cards that allows users to choose which tiltles they want. In an industry first, to be known as Sapphire Select, most of the new Sapphire graphics accelerators will be shipped with a DVD containing a selection of top applications and games from several leading software houses. The end customer can play each of the games for a one hour trial before choosing which titles he or she wants to keep and use the activation codes for those titles. Additional access codes for further titles on the disk will also be offered at discounted prices. Adrian Thompson, Global Marketing Director for Sapphire, said this is an added attraction to choose the Sapphire brand. "We know people don't buy graphics products just for the bundled games," "But Sapphire Select gives a true added value to our products because customers can actually choose what they want after they get the product home."

A Dutch site called Salland Automatisering has started to accept pre-orders for AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card, which has an expected release date of 23rd of January. Earlier reports suggested a retail price of $449 US, although the Dutch site has set a price of €425 which works out at around $615. Admittedly taxes in Europe are higher, and this site may have added a premium as it is the first to allow pre-orders, so $449 in the US isn't completely out of the question.

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced support for legacy PC systems using the AGP graphics bus with a new product in its HD 3000 series which brings the latest graphics architectures and features to this industry standard platform.

The SAPPHIRE HD 3850 AGP is available with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, running at 846MHz (1.7GHz effective) and has a core clock speed of 700MHz. It is a standard ATX format card, compatible with the industry standard AGP interface and with its slim fan assisted cooler the card occupies only a single expansion slot in the PC.

Although Sapphire's new Atomic HD 3870 series was mentioned only twice on our front page and never announced officially, the guys over at Overclockers Club have already published their full review of the card. The HD 3870 Atomic Edition is an overclocked version of the ATI RV670 chipset, which is the basis of the 3800 series of graphics solutions. The Sapphire HD 3870 Atomic Edition is also remarkable for its single slot cooling solution which utilizes a vapor-x chamber. Those of you who are interested to know more can read the full review here.

Sapphire's new Atomic HD 3870 cooler is a single slot design with integrated Vapor Chamber technology. The Vapor Chamber is only 3.0mm thick under the black shell and is said to be able to dissipate as much as 150w of heat to the fins. With a single slot design, the HD 3870 is now able to run Quad CrossfireX on 790FX chipset based motherboards.

SAPPHIRE Technology has now launched a new website dedicated to computer hardware and games. Looking like an AMD Game! clone, the Atomic Home links to the latest gaming news, reviews, drivers and patches and it seems to pave the way for a new hardware line-up. The Atomic series will consist of graphics cards, mainboards and various accessories. First to feature Atomic qualities will be the ATI ATOMIC HD3870 series, an overclocked out of the box ATI Radeon HD 3870.

SAPPHIRE Technology, the pioneer of alternative cooling solutions for PC graphics, has just launched a new ULTIMATE Edition in its exciting new HD 3000 series, to deliver the fastest performing passive cooled graphics card in the World - ever!

It seems as though Sapphire is having some sort of sale, offering their entire stock of HD 2900 graphics card either at a discount, or with free shipping. Get them while they are hot:

• 2900GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3: $170 + shipping.
• 2900Pro 512MB 512-bit GDDR3: $250 shipped.
• 2900XT 512MB 512-bit GDDR3: $280 + shipping.
• 2900Pro 1GB 512-bit GDDR4: $300 + shipping
• 2900XT 1GB 512-bit GDDR4: $340 + shipping.

While NVIDIA launched the 8800GT to much fanfare, hype, and success, AMD is attempting a different approach to get HD 2900GTs out into the public. AMD created the chips, released the specs, made sure that retailers had a ample stock at a fair price ($170USD on Newegg for the Sapphire version). The Sapphire 2900GT has 700 million transistors, is built around an 80nm micro-architecture, has 256-bit 4-channel GDDR3 memory, unified superscalar shader architecture, 240 stream processing units, and full DirectX10.0 support. The Sapphire card is clocked at 600/1600, core/RAM, respectively.

Sapphire has unveiled its high-end Phenom-ready 790FX-powered motherboard. The CrossFireX PC-AM2RD790 will support both AM2 and AM2+ processors, DDR2-1066, six SATA 3.0Gbp/s ports, and three PCI-Express 2.0 16X slot. Sapphire didn't bother to use any copper for the chipset cooling but has equipped the board with an aluminum cooling system, complete with multiple heatpipes. The board is currently ready and will become available by the end of the month.

First to bring the latest AMD graphics architectures to the industry standard AGP bus for desktop graphics, leading supplier Sapphire Technology is now shipping AGP versions of several of its HD 2000 series products. First to be available is the Sapphire HD 2600 PRO AGP which will be shortly followed by the XT version and HD 2400 models.

AMD today announced SAPPHIRE Technology, the official graphics supplier for the World Cyber Games (WCG) Grand Final, will exclusively supply graphics cards based on the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series from AMD for the competition. As the official WCG supplier of GPUs, AMD will co-host a demonstration area with SAPPHIRE to showcase exciting next-generation platform technology for the gaming community. The WCG 2007 event is scheduled to take place in Seattle, WA from October 3-7.

Shortly after GeCube released their GEMINI 3 Radeon HD2600XT X2 graphics card, Sapphire also announced their own version of the dual-GPU HD2600XT X2 graphics card. The pricing is the same as GeCube's offerings at around $259 for the 512MB version and $279 for the 1024MB version.

Sapphire Launches "Go Vertical With Vista" Competition

Sapphire Technology are tantalizing consumers with the opportunity to win a prize bundle, combining a copy of Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate, an AMD Athlon X2 5000+ system processor and a CPU cooling solution courtesy of ZEROtherm's BTF90.

Click here to sign up for the competition.

Sapphire Technology has just announced that in addition to the new HD 2600 and HD 2400 series of graphics accelerators scheduled for release in July, the range will include the new completely passively cooled SAPPHIRE HD 2600 XT ULTIMATE Edition. The SAPPHIRE HD 2600 XT ULTIMATE Edition features the latest unified shader architecture with 24 shader pipelines, core clocks of 800MHz, a 128-bit memory bus and high speed GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.4GHz. Sapphire offers the HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition in two memory sizes, 256MB and 512MB. Other family members include the SAPPHIRE HD 2600 PRO with a similar architecture, but using 256 or 512MB of GDDR2 memory. Also available are the SAPPHIRE HD 2400 XT and SAPPHIRE HD 2400 PRO, cost effective solutions with 8 unified shader pipelines and a 64-bit memory interface using GDDR3 and GDDR2 memory respectively. Sapphire is already shipping its new flagship model the SAPPHIRE HD 2900 XT. Other products in the family are scheduled for delivery in July.