Today we continue our analysis of solutions based on the RV570 core with a review of Sapphire’s Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate. The most unique aspect of the this video card is its use of a Zalman cooling system. Sapphire claims that this addition to the video card allows it to perform better, yet quieter, than competing video cards.

For this review, we will place the Sapphire video card against other competing X1950PRO cards that we have tested. For a deeper understanding of the RV570 core, please refer to our previous article here.

To differentiate their video card from other products, Sapphire has designed part of the card’s packaging to be semi-transparent plastic. The plastic allows consumers to peek into the packaging and actually see the card. It also allows Sapphire to show off the Zalman cooling system that this particular board comes with.

The Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate comes clocked 5% faster than standard X1950PRO speeds. The GPU has a frequency of 580 MHz instead of the ATI default 575 MHz and the memory has a frequency of 1.60 GHz. The card also comes with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory.

The design of the card is dominated by the Zalman VF900-Cu cooler. The cooling system uses heatpipes to dissipate heat while the fan operates at lower speeds. We will discuss more regarding noise output further on into the article. Sapphire has put some effort into making the video card actually look appealing as the parts are all color coded. The orange member at the far right of the video card actually serves no true purpose and is there for pretty much aesthetical value.

Although the cooling solution isn’t as thick as most Zalman products, the video card is still a double slot solution. Standard X1950PROs use a more contained cooling solution which allows most of them to occupy only one slot.

Each memory chip is passively cooled and is equipped with a mini-heatsink. Because the heatsink is blue, we cannot properly classify whether the material used is Copper or Aluminum.

The card comes with a CrossFire brace, a DVI-VGA adapter, a component cable, an S-Video cable, a power cable, and an S-Video/Composite adapter. It also comes with an instruction handbook, a Catalyst Driver CD, PowerDVD and a complete version of the video game Just Cause.

In order to test the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate against other RV570 based cards we have already analyzed in our labs, we used a test system with the exact same components under the same test conditions. In particular, we tested using an AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor along with 2GB of DDR400 memory. Testing was conducted using the resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

We excluded running any tests without anti-aliasing because we mainly want to give an idea of the potential these video cards have. We believe it is important for readers to know the performance these video cards have when running at settings that provide higher image quality.

For the analysis, we ran benchmarks using Prey, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and Serious Sam 2.

As we pointed out in the introduction, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate has the highest memory operating frequency out of all other RV570 solutions. In most tests the Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate ended up having performance just a bit less than the HIS IceQ3 Turbo, mostly because of the IceQ3’s higher GPU clock. Currently, the Sapphire solution turns out to be the second fastest video card out of the whole group.

We tested the operating noise levels of the video cards by placing a ML80 Lafayette Decibel meter 10 centimeters away from the fan of the video card. The Decibel meter was in the same position for every video card we tested. We performed two tests of the video card, one with the card at idle and one with the card at full load with the fan forced to run at full speed. By running the cards at full load, we hoped to create a “worst case scenario.”

To find GPU temperature, we used the well known application ATI Tool. At Idle, we had only the operating system running with no windows open while full load was tested after running the “Nature” test of 3DMark 2001 continuously for 10 minutes.

We measured the power consumption of the system using a power meter. The total power consumption of the system was measured in these tests, however, the only difference between the test systems were the video cards; all other components were exactly the same.

Under idle, the ASUS EAX1950PRO has the lowest level of noise output with the Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate right behind it. At full load, the Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate yet again lands in second place right after the PowerColor X1950PRO. The PowerColor X1950PRO actually has the same noise output for both full and idle simply because the card has a constant RPM.

Please note that the Sapphire X1950PRO on the top is not the video card that we are reviewing today—the Ultimate version which is a little further down in the graph is. The Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate performed well in our temperature tests. The Zalman cooling system thus shows it is quite effective in cooling the card while still maintaining low operational noise levels.

Power consumption is very similar throughout all the cards with the ASUS EAX1950PRO with the overall smallest amount of consumption.

For overclocking, we used the steps that we usually take to overclock video cards. Foremost, we attempted to overclock the video card using ATI Overdrive in the Catalyst driver control panel. If for some reason this utility was disabled, we used the overclocking tool provided by the manufacturer. If the manufacturer had not provided a tool for overclocking, we would then just proceed to overclock the video card using ATI Tool.

With the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate it was possible for us to use ATI Overdrive in order to increase the operating frequencies of the card. While testing, it turned out that the memory frequency the card came set at was already the maximum we could reach, so we were only able to overclock the GPU. Using ATI Overdrive, the maximum operating frequency we could reach was 623 MHz. In order to go beyond this limit, we had to resort to using ATI Tool, which allowed us to reach 648 MHz, the same operating frequency of the ATI reference board.

Overclocked, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate was able to have the highest overall performance with the reference ATI board right behind it.

Conclusion

The Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate created an overall positive picture of itself. The higher memory clock allowed it to achieve high performance out of the box. When we overclocked the board the card was able to have the overall best performance compared to other RV570 based video cards.

The temperature and noise output tests also had rather interesting results. The Zalman cooling system that comes with the card turned out to be very successful in heat dissipation and was able to maintain low operational noise levels.

Currently, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate can be found around the Internet for a price of around $210, which is a little more than most of the other solutions we analyzed today. The HIS X1950PRO IceQ 3 card, however, comes out to be the most expensive coming in at a price of around $260, $230 with rebates.