Sapphire Atlantis 9800 Pro and 9600 Pro Ultimate Editions

Company: Sapphire
Product: 9800 Pro and 9600 Pro Ultimate Editions
Street Price: Unknown
Date Reviewed: July 25, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

The Atlantis 9800 Pro Ultimate:

As you can already tell just from looking at these first set of pictures, the card does in fact use the Zalman ZM80C-HP silent cooler. This is a new cooler from Zalman that uses the heatpipe so that the heatsink does not require a fan. Not having a fan means that the card produces absolutely no noise. There is an option that you can purchase for this heatsink if you would like to add a fan to help cool down the card. You can purchase the ZM-OP1, which is an extremely thin fan that attaches to the side of the heatsink, blowing cool air over the entire card as well as the heatsink. There are also heatinsks covering the memory chips on this card. This could help a little bit in overclocking but we are curious to find out how well the card overclocks with this silent cooler. We'll find out later in the overclocking section.

The card comes in clocked at 380 MHz on the core and the Samsung 2.86ns chips are clocked at 340 MHz. To put is in easier to understand terms, the card is really fast. Along with DirectX 9 support and 8x AGP, the 9800 Pro Ultimate also supports the other technologies such as SMOOTHVISION 2.1, SMARTSHADER 2.1, and FULLSTREAM technology.

Looking at the rear I/O configuration for this card, you can see that it has the standard output for your monitor as well as a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) out. DVI is generally used for LCD monitors and it gives this card dual monitor support. The card also has a TV-out connector. 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.

As with all 9800 Pro's this card does have an extra 4-pin connector that must be connected to ensure that the card will run properly. The connector is firmly secured to the card so it's not going to break unless you get really violent with attaching and disconnecting the power cable. This video card does take a lot of juice and a larger power supply is recommended. We suggest that no less than a quality 350W PSU be used with this card.