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Meet the heat-pipe endowed Sapphire HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition

Sapphire Technology has announced its silent HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition graphics card. The new Sapphire HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition features a passive cooling solution with dual heat-pipes. The dual heat-pipes route around the backside of the graphics card to multiple fins in a radiator-style layout, leaving front-adjacent expansion slots open for use.

Despite having a passive cooler, the Sapphire HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition features AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GPU clocked at 800 MHz, similar to actively cooled models. Sapphire pairs the 800 MHz GPU with 1.4 GHz GDDR3 memory. Sapphire offers the HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition in two memory sizes, 256MB and 512MB. The GPU communicates with the memory via a 128-bit memory interface.

Sapphire equips the HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition with dual dual-link DVI-I outputs and video input and output capabilities. With an included adapter, the Sapphire HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition will output HDMI multichannel audio and high definition video.

Sapphire is currently shipping the HD 2600 XT Ultimate Edition, however, retail availability isn’t expected until July.

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8600GTS > HD2900XT
By maroon1 on 5/24/2007 9:00:05 AM , Rating: 2
HD2600XT has only 4 Render Output Pipelines
8600GTS has 8 Render Output Pipelines

HD2900XT has only 8 Texture mapping units
8600GTS has 16 Texture mapping units

8600GTS has faster memory as well, so there is no doubt that 8600GTS is going to beat HD2600XT




RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Fenixgoon on 5/24/2007 9:24:20 AM , Rating: 2
8600GTS > HD2900XT... you're joking, right?


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By maroon1 on 5/24/2007 9:28:34 AM , Rating: 2
No, I did mistake

I mean 8600GTS > HD2600XT


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By h0kiez on 5/24/2007 9:30:01 AM , Rating: 2
Between the title and his 3 stats, he said 2600XT twice and 2900XT twice. I think it's safe to say he meant the 8600GTS > 2600XT


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Proteusza on 5/24/2007 9:30:02 AM , Rating: 2
He made a spelling mistake there, look at the others, they are all 2600XT.

As for ATI, they neeed to realize that shader power and bandwidth arent everything - now and then graphics cards still need to push pixels and textures around, and ATI's seems to really stingy when it comes to that.


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Chadder007 on 5/24/2007 10:48:13 AM , Rating: 2
As soon as we see some benchmarks in video encoding/decoding and a few games im going ahead with building a new PC. :D
I really wished that ATI went with 256bit memory interface though instead of 128 for this card.


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Lightning III on 5/24/2007 9:53:33 AM , Rating: 3
yea for 50 dollars cheaper you can get a x1950pro that will smoke your 8600gts like a cheap cigar check the bench marks

it has a 256 bit interface and isn't as memory bandwith starved as 8600 or the 2600 series


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By maroon1 on 5/24/2007 11:18:00 AM , Rating: 1
I have checked many benchmarks.

8600GTS beats in X1950pro (and even 7950GT) in shader-intensive games like STALKER and oblivion.

I agree that X1950pro is overall better in current games, but this might change in future games.

Memory bandwidth is not everything. 7600GT has low memory bandwidth compared to 6800GT and Ultra, but it beats them both.


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Lightning III on 5/24/2007 2:39:23 PM , Rating: 2
was that the HIS turbo the current King Of the x1950 Pro its oc ed to 620 core meory 1480 it only gives up the future


RE: 8600GTS > HD2900XT
By Griswold on 5/24/2007 10:25:31 AM , Rating: 2
That remains to be seen and dont pretend you know what you're talking about.

But one thing is for sure, the 8600 series is still overpriced junk.


3, 2, or 1?
By Googer on 5/24/2007 7:56:47 AM , Rating: 2
Wow, I am surprised to see that it doesn't use three PCI slots as a standard 2900XT uses two. Nice job Sapphire.




RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By h0kiez on 5/24/2007 8:10:00 AM , Rating: 2
2900 != 2600...this isn't exactly a high-end gaming card.


RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By Chadder007 on 5/24/2007 9:51:12 AM , Rating: 2
Plus I believe that the 2600xt is going to use the 65nm process.


RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By MatthewAC on 5/24/2007 8:11:58 AM , Rating: 2
Ya, but are these heatsinks really worth it?
I just finished building my brand new rig, on which it employs a 8600gts.
My GTS is the MSI OC one(except for it has a dual slot fan/heatsink solution).
On a silent card theres nothing blowing the air out, of course who am I to judge whacky heatsink designers.

Seeing as I already bought my card I'm interested to see how it stacks up. :)

*DDR3 memory, that might be a killer ;).[My ddr2's runnin at 2.1ghz)


RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By Goty on 5/24/2007 8:26:38 AM , Rating: 5
quote:
On a silent card theres nothing blowing the air out...


*psst* That's what case fans are for!

=P


RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By killerroach on 5/24/2007 8:29:20 AM , Rating: 2
DDR3 might not be so much of a killer when you figure the 2900XT has an option to use GDDR4... at the present time, the memory bandwidth of that card is still its biggest selling point, and why one can hold out hope that newer drivers might make it more competitive with nVidia's offerings (bit late for me, as I just ordered an 8800GTS myself, but still).


RE: 3, 2, or 1?
By rbuszka on 5/24/2007 9:32:50 PM , Rating: 2
Notice that Sapphire's heatsink has significantly more surface area than the typical cooler having a fan. The idea here is that by using heatpipes and a large body of widely-spaced fins (for low airflow impedance), natural convection is enough to cool the GPU. If the card is stable with a passive cooler, why bother with a noisy fan that could fail in three or four years?

I'm personally waiting to see the HIS iSilence passively-cooled 2600XT card. Their design also uses a large body of fins, with a couple of heatpipes conducting the heat, but the real genius of the HIS iSilence and Gigabyte SilentPipe coolers is that they use the case's own negative pressure to draw air in over the fins. Sure, both are dual-slot card coolers as a result of that, but it's still a very elegant solution in a day and age where motherboard layouts are designed to accomodate double-slot video cards anyway. I'm currently using a HIS iSilence Radeon X1650XT card, and it doesn't run particularly hot. The same system uses an MCubed TBalancer programmable microprocessor-controlled fan controller, and the thermistor on the HIS iSilence heatsink controls the speed of the rear case fan. It's a great setup that is truly 'silent' - in that its noise output disappears under the noise floor of a quiet room. I stopped putting up with noisy PCs a long time ago, and I'm glad to see that video card manufacturers are building products for the acoustically-conscious.


Why?
By Proteusza on 5/24/2007 8:11:17 AM , Rating: 3
We dont need a silent 2600 XT, we need a silent 2900 XT.

Or at least quieter.




RE: Why?
By subhajit on 5/24/2007 8:47:37 AM , Rating: 2
They should come out with a 65nm refresh of 2900XT.


RE: Why?
By Griswold on 5/24/07, Rating: 0
RE: Why?
By rbuszka on 5/24/2007 9:39:28 PM , Rating: 2
Why is this a big deal? Because some of us are sick and tired of putting up with noisy PCs invading our space, and there's really no reason from an engineering standpoint why silent operation can't be attained. Silence is the newest defining characteristic of truly high-end hardware that takes both performance and ergonomics into account. (Noise is an ergonomic concern.)


RE: Why?
By bunnyfubbles on 6/6/2007 5:52:12 AM , Rating: 2
But you have to be incredibly stupid to believe they purposely throw on loud cooling solutions to higher end cards such as the 2900XT if they could have a reasonable quiet/silent solution instead.

I remember the backlash of when 2 slot cooling designs were being introduced for retail video cards, to get silence for today's top end you'd need 3 or 4 slot designs...that wouldn't bode well.

If you want quiet and high end you're almost always going to have to rip off the junk that comes with it and throw on your own choice of 3rd party cooling.

Whereas with midrange the parts are naturally designed to be less powerful and thus less power hungry...top that off with the fact that they're almost always the pioneering parts when it comes to die shrinks and you get parts that are just begging to be designed with fanless cooling solutions.


How about an AGP version
By PAPutzback on 5/24/2007 9:36:02 AM