ForceWare 52.16: NVIDIA's retaliation
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800
Package bundle:
 The box with an impressive and smart drawing included the following:
- the board itself with power patch plugs;
- a CD with the game Tomb Rider: Angel of Darkness;
- a DVI-to-D-Sub adapter;
- a video cable;
- an S-Video cable;
- an RCA-to-S-Video adapter;
- 3 CDs with drivers and software.
What we can note is that ATI's traditional (good old) partners are turning over a new leaf and start accompanying their products with really rich package bundles.
Design and board layout
The board's design is a clone of ATI's reference board. The PCB is designed as per ATI's requirements and no differences are seen.
The board offers ATI's traditional bright red color of the PCB, has 128 MB DDR memory onboard, the AGP 2x/4x/8x interface and a standard set of outputs: one analogous, one digital, and one S-Video. The good old two-phase SC1175CSW of Semtech is used as a voltage regulator.
The video card is equipped with 128 MB DDR memory packaged in 8 chips (4 chips on each of the sides - front and rear) within the advanced BGA packaging, with the 256-bit memory bus. The memory is produced by Hynix (HYB25D128323C-3.0), offers a 3.0 ns access time, which is equivalent to approximately 333 MHz of memory operation (666 MHz), but the memory runs at its intended frequency 290 MHz (580 MHz). That is, there is a small overclocking margin for the memory. The graphics chip also runs at 325 MHz as per the specifications.
There is absolutely no cooling for the memory chips. To cool the graphics processor, a low-profile cooling system is used which hardly can be regarded as effective enough. A standard reference small fan is fitted on the radiators. Nevertheless, in the nominal mode during the long 3D testing session there were no stability problems found. At the same time, the radiators were heated up quite immensely.
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MoBo:
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VGA Card:
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CPU & Memory:
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