Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro

Sapphire's version of the X1950 Pro deviates very little from ATI's reference design. Rather than ATI's red PCB and cooler, Sapphire went with its signature blue theme and added a sticker on top of the cooler. Additionally, Sapphire's fan appears to have more blades than the reference card's fan.

A Shiny New Sapphire X1950 Pro Sometimes having the blues isn't so bad...

Even with a futuristic fembot doing a Hulk Hogan pose on the cooler, the Sapphire X1950 Pro is a cool looking card. The translucent blue plastic reveals the metal fins beneath. On the right side of the card, you can see the small fan that pushes air across the card to keep it cool. In the second picture, you can see that there are no memory chips on the back of the card, which means all of the memory chips are covered by the cooler on the front.

We are very happy to see that the X1950 Pro is a single-slot card. Even a CrossFire X1950 Pro setup shouldn't take up too much room inside your case. In the second picture above, you can see the two CrossFire connectors. ATI decided that each CrossFire card would come with the proper CrossFire ribbon cable. That way if you buy two, each one will come with one, and you can hook up CrossFire mode without worrying about whether or not your motherboard included the proper CrossFire cables.

Like most good mid-range cards these days, the Sapphire X1950 Pro features two DVI connectors. In addition to DVI, the X1950 includes an HDTV-out connector. It should be no surprise to most of you that this card must be connected to your system's power supply via a 6-pin PCI Express power cable.