CES 2007 – Day Two Show Coverage From Las Vegas

Could Sapphire Make Quad-Crossfire Possible

The highlight of our day was when we got a chance to speak with Sapphire and got to see the very first use of two ATI GPU’s on a single PCB, what Sapphire is calling their X1950 Pro Dual. As you can see this is one very big card! All the space is needed for the two GPU’s, 1GB total memory with 512MB dedicated to each core, and a PCI-Express bridge chip. As you can see at the end of the card that it requires two PCI-E power connectors. The heat sink used on the card did a great job keeping it cool while we watched it run through the 3DMark06 Demo. It’s an all aluminum heat sink with 4 heat pipes to wisk heat away from the GPU’s. We weren’t allowed to run the benchmark but can say that it ran the demo very well. What’s more is that they are working closely with ATI to get two of these cards running together for a killer Quad-CrossFire setup!

I really can’t say enough about how good this card looks with the traditional Sapphire blue PCB, the artwork Sapphire has placed on the heat sink. Their mixture of blue, black, and silver looks fantastic especially in contrast to the white Sapphire AM2 motherboard. Well done Sapphire!

While we weren’t given a firm price, we speculate this card to come in at less than $400.