Card appearance
The card
A look at the half-height Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 256MiB HDMI card shows exactly where ATI's largest AIB is positioning it. HTPC users will rejoice at reasonable 3D power that's allied to ATI's Avivo video-processing technology and outputs that include HDMI.
The ATI Radeon X1600 (RV530) Pro packs in 12 pixels pipelines, 5 vertex shaders, and an ultra-threaded architecture that can handle up to 128 small-size threads. Further, ATI endows the X1600 Pro with a ringbus memory controller that makes for easier engineering, and, of course, shader model 3.0. If you're interested in just how it works in more detail, please head on over to our reference card review here.
It's relatively easy to cool the Pro's 500MHz core that's designed on a 90nm manufacturing process. That's why Sapphire's gotten away with a small fan mounted on top of a minimal cooler. We've seen a number of X1600-based cards sport passive heatsinks, but due to the spatial restrictions imposed by Sapphire here, that's not an option. In the main, the fan spins slowly enough for it not to be noticeable in most systems, even small form-factor models.
Here's where the fun starts.
Sapphire uses Silicon Image's PanelLink Sil1930 ASIC for HDMI output with HDCP compliance, meaning that the S.I. ASIC has an inbuilt cipher engine required for HDCP key exchange. As you may know, HDMI is the current digital output of choice, combining 1080p-resolution picture quality with high-definition audio (192kHz, 8-channel) in one cable. The card also supports S/PDIF-Input in a couple of ways, allowing you to import audio (from your soundcard/motherboard's S/PDIF-Out) that's then fed through the HDMI output. Alternatively, you can connect audio to the same input via a supplied cable that hooks up to your motherboard's S/PDIF-Out header. You can see both the HDMI output and the S/PDIF input at the rear of the card. Humble HD15 is included to offer multi-monitor support, too.
Nothing much to write about on the back, really. There's a total of 256MiB of 792MHz-rated GDDR3 memory that interfaces with the card on a 128-bit bus, offering 12.5GiB/s of potential bandwidth.
A simple graphics card that's endowed with native HDMI connectivity; the first we've seen here at HEXUS.
