Sapphire has a suite rented at one of the Hotels on the Strip. There are a few new hardware offerings being presented without the stress and noise of the show floor. The first very interesting item is the first truly compatible AM2 based mainboard, which was created in cooperation with DFI. The RD790 based board comes with three PCIe x16 slots and features passive heatpipe cooling. The backplate holds part of this cooling setup and can be extended with a heatpipe to the rear of the PSU, to cool everything even more.


We have reported on the special Radeon HD 3870 which utilizes a special single slot cooler. This is rather different form of cooling mechanism, known as Vapour Chamber Technology. These cards will have the Atomic brand and will ship in a pretty cool, silver aluminum case along with all the cables and software.


A passive HD 3850 can already be had and Sapphire has extended the same type of cooling to the faster HD 3870. There are four heatpipes and a massive cooler to draw the heat away from the card.


Another first is the single slot air cooler for the HD 3870. It features a wide and fairly large radial fan to push more air across the GPU and a heatsink on the VRMs, which also get cooled by the air of the GPU fan.


Another very unique piece is the AGP based HD 3850. Yes you read right - AGP. This means that current users, which still use the aging interface can upgrade to a DirectX 10 based card without dumping their existing board and possibly memory. The rear holds the Rialto bridge chip to translate bus data into the AGP format.