Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 Pro

Company: Sapphire
Product: Atlantis 9800 Pro
Street Price: ~$405
Date Reviewed: June 19, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

The Card Layout:

The front design of this card is pretty close to that of the ATi reference 9800 Pro. As you can see the PCB is the red like the 9700 Pro. Also there are tiny heat sinks keep some regulators cool. The back of the card is also the same as the ATi reference card. The main difference we can see in design from the reference card is the heat sink used to cool the GPU.

The heat sink is the same silver/grey color used on the 9600 Pro we reviewed yesterday. The unit look high quality and bears the Sapphire name around the edges of the heat sink. The fan is not loud at all and should be sufficient for some good overclocking as we will show later. The use of this type of heat sink does show that Sapphire has taken the next step from the reference design to make this card even more geared toward the enthusiasts.

The cards rear I/O configuration has the output that goes to the monitor as well as a connection for a TV-out. There is also a DVI-I (Digital Visual Interface) connector. More and more people are starting to use their PC's as their home multimedia center. The addition of the TV-out is nice but we would have also like to have seen a TV-in connector. There are a few users out their with huge monitors who would probably like to be able to use a TV-in feature.

The power connector going to the card is a lot different from the 9700 Pro. This time a standard 4-pin Molex connector is used instead of the 4-pin floppy connector. This will give the card more juice than what is supplied by the AGP slot. Also the 4-pin Molex connector is sturdy where as the floppy seemed somewhat weak and subject to breaking if the cable was removed enough. This  connector is flush with the card making it more durable and since it is large, it is easy to remove and connects directly to the PSU.

Again, Sapphire has chosen to use the Samsung K4D26323RA-GC2A BGA memory chips on the 9800 Pro. These chips are rated at 2.86ns which means they can be clocked up to 350 MHz. We have heard that some other brands use faster memory chips but all the 9800's we have tested so far have used the 2.86ns chips. Obviously faster chips means for higher overclocking but these chips overclock very well as we will show later in the review.