Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X700 PRO Board
The second X700 board we are looking at in this review is a retail board, which is already available; the Sapphire Radeon Hybrid X700 PRO.
The Sapphire X700 PRO sticks to the ATI reference specifications for the X700 PRO platform, which means that it has a lower core and memory clockspeed than the XT, but has 256MB of frame buffer for the same suggested retail price.
Sapphires PRO board sticks very much to the reference XT layout, although you can see Sapphires individual touches - the blue PCB being the most obvious. The cooler is also of Sapphire own design and during operation it seemed to be much more well behaved than the XT cooler ATI were using, although the core is running a reasonable lower speed. The board also appeared to stay cool during operation.
As the board is running memory speeds of 432MHz it is using GDDR3, which we would assume to be Samsung's 2.0ns memory. Although it's not actually necessary Sapphire have included little RAM-sinks on the memory chips, which might help a little if you wish to attempt overclocking the RAM. As the PRO board has 256MB of frame buffer the memory chips are populated on both the front and backside of this board, unlike the XT.
Being very close to the reference design the Sapphire board also sticks with the same outputs of DVI, VGA and TV-Out. As with the reference XT, this board also lacks the Rage Theater chip for video-in.
