14 DAY TRIAL // Because AMD's recently released Radeon graphics cards have been highly appreciated by both the media and the users, all of the company's partners must be doing very well. This is but a natural conclusion, if we only take in consideration the number of manufacturers that have already released custom-built cards based on AMD's RV770 chips. Without a single doubt, one such manufacturer is Sapphire, which has recently been spending a lot of time in the spotlight, mostly due to its "Toxic" card based on the HD 4850 GPU.
As a matter of fact, Sapphire is also responsible for the release of a 1GB version of the above-mentioned graphics processor. Also, the company used the same chip for another of its cards, one that hasn't yet been unveiled, but has already been spotted on the Internet. From the looks of it, Sapphire is really fond of ATI's current mainstream graphics solution.
Unlike the "Toxic" model and the 1GB version, the new card doesn't appear to be based on the same PCB. As a couple of pictures posted on the Donanimhaber website reveal, the new card, which has not yet received the official treatment from Sapphire, sports a totally different PCB. The card's voltage regulation part is moved to the other side of the PCB and is cooled by a small heatsink. The memory chips have no cooling solution of their own, so they rely on the dual-slot custom cooler that the card has been equipped with.
As far as technical specifications go, the card will sport a GPU speed of 625MHz. The 512MB of GDDR3 memory will be clocked at 1986MHz, which is pretty much the same as with a reference card. Unfortunately, at this point in time, we can't determine what the pricing for the card will be or under what brand name it is going to be made available.
All recent reports surrounding AMD's graphics cards seem to indicate that the company itself wasn't very confident in the performance levels achieved by their new products. The cards are selling quite well but, given that most of them are priced below $300, the company isn't getting that much money out of its latest Radeons.