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ATi's Radeon
9800 Pro and 9600 Pro GPUs are two of the most popular 3D
chipsets on the market today. A multitude of OEMs
build boards based on these two chipsets and most of them
strictly adhere to ATi's reference designs, for the PCB and
cooling system. It has gotten to the point that if you
line up cards sold by a few top manufactures side-by-side,
it would be almost impossible to them apart. Well, all
that is about to change! Today,
Sapphire Technologies unveils two new products in their
Atlantis line of video cards, the Ultimate Edition Atlantis
9800 Pro and the Ultimate Edition Atlantis 9600 Pro.
These two cards use PCBs based on ATi reference designs, but
they are equipped with custom, passive cooling solutions.
These Ultimate Edition Radeons are every bit as powerful as
other cards powered by similar GPUs. They run at the
same clock speeds, have the same features and use the same
drivers. However, there is one thing missing,
Noise...
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Temperature Readings |
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Passive Cooling? |
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The Sapphire
Ultimate Edition Radeons' main attractions are their large,
passive heatsinks with heat-pipes. What these coolers
are supposed to do, is silently transfer heat from the GPU
side of the heatsink, to the heatsink on the rear of the
board, where it can then radiate into the air inside your
case. There is a liquid inside the heat-pipe that when
heated, migrates to the opposite end of the pipe. It
then cools, and the liquid travels back down to the other
end of the heat-pipe. This cycle is repeated over and
over as the heatsink with heat-pipe warms up and cools down.
TEMPERATURES LISTED IN
DEGREES FAHRENHEIT
We took some
basic temperature readings, using a digital thermometer with
a thermal probe, to give you an idea of how these coolers
perform at idle, and when under a load. We did not
have the means to actually monitor the GPU's core
temperature directly, so it was impossible for us to give
you an accurate, apple-to-apples comparison of core
temperatures between similar active and passively cooled
cards. The temperatures above were taken with the
probe fastened to the exact same position on both Sapphire
cards...
As you can see,
the Radeon 9800 Pro, which is built on a .15 micron
manufacturing process, generates significantly more heat
than the 9600 Pro which is built using a more advanced .13
micron process. The Radeon 9600 Pro is also comprised
of fewer transistors, which further reduces its thermal
output. With ambient temperatures at roughly the same
level, the Radeon 9800 Pro runs 30° - 35° hotter than the
9600 Pro.
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Gaming & Screenshots |
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It's
Playtime! |
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1024x768 - 6X AA - 16X ANISO
Before we got to
benchmarking the Sapphire Ultimate Edition Radeons we're
looking at today, we installed them into our test system and
spent a few days playing some popular games at a resolution
of 1024x768, with 6X AA and 16X Aniso enabled. We
played the Hulk for a little while and played some Unreal
Tournament 2003, but we definitely had the most fun with
Star Trek Elite Force II. We snapped a few screenshots
to show you how Elite Force II looked while we played the
game at these settings. With AA and Aniso enabled,
edges remained sharp and the textures were nice and clear.
Both of the Sapphire Cards had the horsepower to
consistently maintain smooth frame rates at the settings we
used.
Tiger
Woods 2003
1024x768
NO AA |
1024x768
4X AA |
1024x768
6X AA |
Over the last
few months, we've done quite a few image quality comparisons
using different GPUs, so we won't go in-depth again here.
However, we still wanted to show just how well these cards
can clean up an image when anti-aliasing is enabled.
The three screenshots above are from EA's Tiger Woods PGA
Tour 2003. Open up the first image, and look at the
jaggies around Tiger's shirt and along the shaft of the
club. Then open up the 4X and 6X AA shots. The
difference is like night and day.
A
Closer Look at The Radeon 9800 Pro
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