Sapphire X1950 Pro

The card itself is quite different from other x1950 Pros as although the stock heatsink is still present, the shroud to direct air flow on the Sapphire card is different; as is the fan. It will be interesting to see how it compares to the stock cooler temperatures from our Connect3D card.

The front is a hologramatic blue in colour with the same cyborg Sapphire girly, showing us that she really does love computer hardware; like we wish all women did.

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The cooler is an exhaust style cooler which entails a fan sucking air from the inside of the case, blowing it over a heatsink shrouded in plastic and then out of the back of the case. At least that's the usual plan with coolers like this, however on the x1950 cards the shroud doesn't reach the back of the case and the air is simply deposited at the back of the card. Surely an exhaust option would have improved cooling here?

At the back of the card there is the typical twin DVI ports allowing for two monitors to be powered by a single card.

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At the "top" of the x1950 Pro there are twin crossfire bridge connectors which currently allows for a dual graphics card setup. However it has been stated in the future it may be possible for 3 graphics cards to be run together using these connectors.

The GPU is powered by a single 6pin PCI-E power connector which is the same across the whole x1950 range.

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On the back of the card you can see that the cooler is held on with just a simple screw on backing plate. This combined with the low profile of the cooler itself means that this card only takes up a single slot altogether; great for those with small PCs or cramped PCIE slots.

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