Sapphire Atlantis Pro
As you can see, it's the ATI reference card layout with Sapphire's own cooler. As far as I understand it, ATI still make the actual cards for their partner manufacturers (I may be wrong about this) and it's then up to those partners to customise the card if needed and bundle it all up ready for retail.
Being a white box sample, I can't comment on Sapphire's software bundle or the overall presentation (although the press shots of the retail box look very pretty) but I can comment on the cooler.
A heck of a lot more interesting than the black thing you get on most Radeon 9700 Pro's, it more than likely doesn't cool any better but it certainly makes the card stand out.
Other than that, it's totally bog standard fare as far as a Radeon 9700 Pro goes. You have the metal heatsink/shield on the back of the card (not present on my 'ATI' sample) and you have uncooled 2.2ns (910MHz DDR, ouch!) rated modules of Samsung's finest TinyBGA DDR memory.
The floppy type power connector is present and it's needed to power the behemoth of a GPU. 110 million transistors and 0.15 micron process type makes for a large GPU indeed with it's own set of power requirements to complicate things. The Radeon 9700 Pro GPU is no Intel i845 northbridge (got an i845 board? take off the cooler one day and have a look, its tiny) that's for sure.
If you don't power up your system with that auxilliary power feed connected to the card, you get a series of beeps from your machine to rival WW2 air raid warnings and a lovely message on your display telling you to please plug it in and not be so silly next time.
That's it as far as the actual card goes. Nothing hugely exciting but worth a few pictures at least. Small compared to a GeForce4 Ti4600, slightly different compared to a 'stock' Built By ATI card.
So what about performance?
