Intro

I'm a sucker for new hardware. If I had my way, I would purchase and upgrade with the latest and newest hardware available at least once monthly. However, my bank account is continually being drained by stupid crap like food, housing, vehicle maintenance, clothing for the kids, etc... By the time I'm done I'm lucky to be able to afford a box of CD-R's, much less a new top of the line CPU, mobo, or video card. So I've learned to weigh the benefits of top of the line products vs mid-range products, and have found that dollar for dollar, mid-range is the way to go. That's the offering that Sapphire has brought to the table today, one of their mid-range products; the Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Ultimate Edition video card.

Sapphire products are well known among the more "informed" computer users as the video card to get that meets or exceeds ATI's specifications while offering their products at a lower price than most other companies that produce ATI based video cards. The Sapphire Ultimate Edition version of ATI's 9600XT video card deviates from the original ATI design specification by replacing the heatsink and fan with a heatpipe that produces absolutely no noise at all. How effective is Sapphire's change from the original spec and how effective is it against slightly higher and slighter lesser offerings? That's what we'll find out.

The Package & Contents

One thing that I could never accuse Sapphire of is lack of originality on their box designs. The Sapphire card was snugly fit into a box that was obviously made to be shown off. The front is eye-catching and the back has a window that allows you to view the card and good looking heatpipe apparatus. This doesn't mean a damn thing in regard to performance, but it does mean that Sapphire is doing well enough to afford some pretty good marketing personnel.

There was plenty to look at once the box was opened and emptied. Sapphire included many goodies. When I saw the owner's manual I was extremely impressed at how thick it was until I actually started reading it and noticed that only the first 10 pages were in English. I guess that is attributed to Sapphire's worldwide appeal. There is also a S-Video cable, a RCA cable, a S-Video to RCA converter, and one item that needs to be included with all digital capable video cards, a DVI to VGA converter.

The software I received included the driver disk with the Catalyst 3.9's and a very cool case sticker inside, a licensed version of PowerDVD, a disk containing Sapphire's Redline Overclocking Utility, a full version of Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness (not my cup of tea but the frau likes it), and then we come to the Coup de Gras...a certificate good for a copy of Half Life 2 (if ever released). Hell, just the Half Life 2 certificate alone almost makes up for over 25% of the purchase price. There has been an issue lately with whether these certificates would continue to be offered with ATI products, and some ATI affiliates have discontinued them, but as far as I know Sapphire will keep including these in the box.