We recently sat down with Daniel Foster, the PR & Marketing Manager for the EMEA region for Sapphire and had an interesting chat about their current lineup and whats in store. Sapphire is the biggest ATI graphics card manufacturer and produces boards for ATI as well as large OEMs companies. They have their own retail brand as well which focuses on everything from mainstream to the enthusiastic segment. The following are some of the points mentioned in our conversation. Actual quotes from Dan are in yellow:
As per the current plans, we expect ATI to announce their new GPU(s) in June. Now, Computex starts on the 31st of May this year and goes on till the 4th of June but as per our understanding, the announcement will be after Computex. However, we won’t be surprised if ATI moves it up by a few days as Computex is one of the biggest tech shows. That about as much information as we’re allowed to reveal on the 520 at this moment.
The X800XL will be GPU that will be focused upon for two reasons- the yields are good and the costs are comparatively lower. We asked Sapphire about ATI’s MSRP of $299 for the x800XL and why the current crop of cards is selling for quite a bit higher than that and this is what Dan had to say “ATIs pricing is most likely based on their own calculations and estimates. Also every Distributor and Reseller decides on his own margins and it very difficult to estimate where the price will end up before final production boards are available.” In our opinion, ATI is currently just playing with the numbers to create a hype about the "below $300 mark."
Our next topic was the X850XT and its limited availability and the 512MB version. According to Sapphire, we’ll probably never see an X850XT with 512MB because of the low yields however, we will see another ATI GPU based 512MB card shortly.
The X850 PRO might be a card that could be available in reasonable quantities. The x850 PRO is basically a 12 pipeline card with lower clock speeds than the x850XT and will be almost comparable to the X800XL in performance. However, it will have higher overclocking potential because of a higher layered PCB and faster components.
Enthusiasts who have used ATI cards are probably aware of “ATI Tool” which is arguably the best utility to overclock your ATI card. Sapphire has partnered with the person who produced this utility and they will be bundling a modified version of this application called Trixx with their graphics cards. The application will only work on a Sapphire card however, there’s no saying if a smart Alec will “modify” the utility to work on all ATI cards.
Sapphire is introducing a very cool idea with software bundle. Instead of having the usual one or two games in the package, we have two DVD9 discs with eight of the latest games. Out of these, you will be able to play all of them for an hour or so and whichever one or two you like (depending on which product you purchase), can be unlocked to full versions which we think will be through a code of some sort. The remaining games can be bought for a lower than market cost.
Adding to the idea above, Sapphire might also include high-end applications for video editing and DVD production which can be activated instead of games for people that are more into audio/video encoding.
One of the versions of the X800XL cards that Sapphire will sell will have an extremely low noise level. Sapphire has also started measuring noise in terms of SONES instead of just Dbs. The reason is that first of all, its very hard to measure Dbs and secondly Dbs are not linear meaning 2 db is not necessarily twice as loud as 1Db. To give you a rough idea about SONES, the 6800GT under normal usage produces between 2-3 SONES and goes as high as around 5 SONES with the fan running on full speed. Sapphire’s x800XL implementation that we’re talking about will produce less than one SONE.
Sapphire is very much going to continue supporting AGP at least until the end of this year. They will have their X800XL AGP version available in the next few weeks using a bridge and it will be slightly more expensive than the PCI-E version- about $20 or so. Unlike the PCI-E version, the AGP card will require external power as per the sample we saw.
Sapphire cards are priced a bit higher than other cards and Dan pointed out a couple of reasons for that. First of all, all the capacitors are checked and marked on Sapphire boards. Next, every single card is tested three times in different testbeds with different applications which is why you might see a couple of scratches around the PCI-E or AGP interface. We think this is a very good thing and always recommend our viewers on spending a tad bit more to get a better quality product.
Sapphire has some stock of X700XT with them which they will be using in their X700 Toxic pro graphics card with the VGA Silencer cooling system from Arctic cooling. Since these cards will be based on the X700XT instead of X700 PRO, you’re looking at a better overclocking potential.
ATI’s upcoming “SLI” technology will allow for a lot more flexibility by….oops- that’s not supposed to be here. That’s all for now folks
