Connect3D & Sapphire Radeon X1900GT

Sapphire Radeon X1900GT 256MB

Core Clock: 575MHz
Memory Clock: 1200MHz

Sapphire's Radeon X1900GT is branded with a nice bit of artwork on the heatsink. The card is virtually the same as Connect3D's and all ATI partner boards too, although Sapphire has chosen to use the older heatsink design featured on the Radeon X1800XL and Radeon X1800GTO cards - we'll come to that shortly.

In our opinion, the box design stands out and looks pretty cool. Inside the box, there is a driver CD, a copy of Cyberlink PowerDirector, Cyberlink PowerDVD along with the Sapphire Select games bundle. This bundle includes an activation key for one of the four games on the Sapphire Select DVD. As with other cards, there is the option to buy the remaining three games for less than the suggested retail price. The games included are Tony Hawk's Underground 2, Richard Burns Rally, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within and Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30.

Along with that Sapphire includes the same cable options as Connect3D - both cards have VIVO functionalities and Sapphire's cable assortment compliments that feature. There is a YPbPr component cable, along with a combi cable featuring Composite In, Composite Out, S-Video In and S-Video out connections. The bundle also includes extension cables for both S-Video and Composite connections. Finally, there are two DVI-to-VGA convertors and a hard-copy manual to round off a good bundle. Sapphire has clearly gone to some effort to differentiate itself from other board partners in the bundle department.

The cooler is the same design as the one that we have seen on Sapphire's Radeon X1800XL, and also the Radeon X1800GTO. When this cooler was fitted to the two Radeon X1800-series cards, it was often loud and generally irritating - we've often wanted to stop it from spinning just to retain our sanity. This one seems a little different though.

By no means is it quiet all of the time like the excellent cooler on the GeForce 7900 GTX, but it appears to be relatively quiet during normal use - it's not spinning up and down changing pitch every time you move the mouse. This is definitely an improvement on the two Radeon X1800-series cards using this cooler. During heavy gaming, the card spins up a little, but not to 100% - we'd estimate that it was running at around 75% speed.