Sapphire X1950 Pro 256MiB PCIe
Sapphire was kind enough to seed us with a couple of X1950 Pro 256MiB retail cards at short notice, so let's take a look at the full-card physical manifestation of retail X1950 Pro, shall we?
Sapphire's sensibly opted for the large reference heatsink and off-centre fan combination to remove the heat generated by the 80nm core. The warm air is pushed to the back of the card but the single-slot design precludes the exhausting of air outside the chassis, as we've seen on the recent Radeon X1950 XTX 512MiB card. We like the fact that the cooler concurrently cools the GPU and RAM, and it's thermostatically controlled into the bargain. We managed to reach a load core temperature of 68C, which is markedly lower than, say, an X1950 XTX 512MiB's.
Look at the top-left of the above picture. Notice something that's been missing from ATI cards and present on NVIDIA's? ATI, however, relies on two connectors rather than SLI's one.
The die shrink and associated power savings that are derived from a reduction in the manufacturing process size still require an auxillary PCIe 6-pin connector to be used, though. Brief testing highlighted that this X1950 Pro, at full load, consumed around 10 watts less than the lower-clocked X1900 GT and a whopping 50W less than the X1950 XTX.
Twin dual-link DVI at your service, sir. This card will run a couple of ultra-high-resolution (QWXGA) monitors without undue stress. AIB partners will have the option of adding a VIVO ASIC to their models. Sapphire, however, keeps this a vanilla version.
Nothing much to report on the back. The card's 256MiB GDDR3 modules are based on the front. Interestingly, Sapphire has raised the core speed to 581MHz and memory speed to a full 1400MHz on its X1950 Pro model.
