I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...
Apart from being a song from the mid-nineties, blue also happens to be the predominant colour of this card - and when you look carefully at the name you'll understand why. Yes, this is a card from Sapphire, dripping with ocean-blue coloured PCB and a very standard cooler.
Indeed, the cooler is so standard that it has suddenly become noteworthy - we really have to mention how boring and barely adequate it is at the task of cooling. A very small amount of aluminium fins underneath that thin plastic sheath with an equally thin fan just barely manage to keep the entire card from becoming heated under load - especially the memory chips. The RV730 PRO core and 512BM of GDDR3 memory are very standard, as are the two DVI ports, analogue video out, and the two Crossfire tabs. We could go on to describe how the PCIe 2.0 pins are decidedly functional, or the mishmash of solid and electrolytic capacitors used, or even how underwhelming the bundle with just the bare essentials such as DVI adapters is, but we wouldn't want to bore you.
Instead, we'll describe the performance - it's rather surprising. Compared to the Gigabyte 4650 with twice the memory, this card actually pulls ahead significantly in every single benchmark. The massive increase in memory bandwidth is to thank here, and it is able to keep the core sated with big meaty chunks of data, rather than just teasing it with entrées and mere morsels (bytes, if you will). With the core kept fed, it's able to perform P1061 better in Vantage, which is a rather phenomenal increase for a simple memory change!
The card is quite decent overall, and the price is definitely something to consider.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010