Sapphire Technology is now shipping its latest series of graphics accelerators based on ATI's X1600 series; an affordable garphics solution for the midrange market. The cards support Shader Model 3.0 and the Avivo technology and promise high performance and high fidelity video playback. They are also ready for use in pairs in Crossfire dual graphics systems.

The company ships the Radeon X1600XT and the Radeon X1600Pro graphics cards. The XT version is equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory and features clock speeds of 590MHz (core) and 690MHz (memory). The RADEON X1600Pro features the same exciting new architecture, operating at the slightly reduced clock speeds of 500MHz (core) and 400MHz (memory) with a choice of memory configurations aimed at delivering a range of price/performance options. Both models have VGA, DVI and TV out ports.

Retail versions of these new Sapphire graphics accelerators will ship with multimedia software including PowerDVD and Sapphire Select. Each card is also bundled with a DVD containing a selection of top games. The end customer can play each of the games for a one hour trial before choosing which titles he or she wants to keep and using the activation codes for those titles.



In addition, Sapphire today announced the availability of the Radeon X1800XT Performance Edition, a preoverclocked version of the X1800Xt card which features a 512MB DDR3 and runs at 700MHz core and 800Mhz memory (=1600MHz data rate).