The Card

The card comes with Sapphire's blue PCB. Some users may like it, some may not. At least it shows that Sapphire tries to have something innnovative over all the other board partners who have the red ATI PCBs. I wonder, will the new AMD-ATI PCBs be green now?


The backside is pretty clean. The memory chips have been moved to the other side for a while now. While faster cards need an extra power connector to get the juice they need, this card will get all its power via the PCI-Express bus.


This card has one analog and one DVI connector. This makes sense because most budget card users do not have a TFT or a TFT with DVI input. If you need to connect two analog displays you can use the included DVI adapter.


Sapphire's video card cooler is an all aluminum construction which is cheaper and lighter. Even though the fan design is remotely similar to the high-end video cards it is definitely less powerful. For example hot air does not get exhausted like on the X1900 series, but stays inside the case. The heat output of the card is probably so small that there is no point to add the extra engineering and cost required.


The fan sucks in air from above the fan and exhausts the warm air at the backside. Sapphire did not put a temperature sensor on the card, so temperature based fan control is not possible. This means that the fan will always run at the same speed, no matter if in idle or under load.