Sapphire Gets Hot by Going Cool

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Introduction

Pushing the envelope is the theme of the entire semiconductor market. How fast can it go? How much can it process? That's what it's all about. Even though some of the products we test for our readers are out of the reach of the average consumer, we still love showing off the latest and greatest, the extreme and the cool, because we know that eventually, these technologies will move from the leading edge to the mainstream. So when Sapphire told us that it was working on a special graphics card that brought liquid cooling to ordinary graphics consumers - ones without the knowledge level of high-end enthusiasts - we had to get our hands on it to try it out!

For those of you who are not familiar with Sapphire Technologies, it is one of the largest of ATI's customers and partners. According to ATI CEO David Orton, "Sapphire is ATI's largest and best performing partner worldwide." Sapphire has over 3,000 employees located in North America, Europe, South Africa, and Asia. Its facilities in Dong Guan, China, provide plenty of production capacity; in fact, Sapphire claims to be able to manufacture over 1.8 million graphics cards per month. With high volume production and a hot new liquid cooling solution, Sapphire has taken the standard Radeon X1900XTX and cranked up the clock speeds to create the Toxic X1900XTX.