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 9600 Pro Ultimate:

Once again like we just saw with the 9800 Pro Ultimate, Sapphire has chosen to use a fanless cooler on top of the 9600 Pro core. The cooler uses the heatpipe technology to transfer the heat away from the chip. This cooler is going to be totally silent and should do a nice job of keeping the 9600 Pro cool. This card does not have ramsinks covering the Samsung 2.86ns chips, but overall we don't think that the heatsinks are necessary for good overclocking. As you can see from the picture this cooler also has the Sapphire badge and ATi logo.

The stock speeds of this video card are set at 400 MHz for the core and 300 MHz on the memory. As we have stated before, these clock speeds seem fast and one would think that the card should perform close to the 9800 Pro but the reason it doesn't is because the 9600 Pro has four rendering pipelines versus the eight found on the 9800 Pro. Since this chip is utilizes the same manufacturing process as the 9800, it supports technologies such as SMOOTHVISION 2.1, SMARTSHADER 2.1, and FULLSTREAM technology.

The memory found on the Sapphire 9600 Pro Ultimate are the Samsung BGA chips labeled K4D26323RA-GC2A. The chips are rated at 2.86ns meaning they have a maximum speed of 350MHz. These memory modules should be good for overclocking well above the stocks speeds of 300 MHz, which we will test out more in the overclocking section. For now the only comments we really have about the memory chips is that they are high quality and are made by a trustworthy manufacturer like Samsung.

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. In case this seems like deja vu, it is because this is the same exact configuration as the 9800 Pro above.