by Rob Williams on March 5, 2007 in Graphics & Displays
Sapphire has recently launched two new video cards that are designed to deliver you a great Vista experience. Though not touted as gaming cards, they offer enough performance to be worthy of consideration over on-board video.
Like it’s little brother, the X1550 comes in the same clean white box, which includes just enough detail to give you an idea of what to expect. No alien this time around, but instead a nameless blue vixen.
This model includes many additional cables however, in addition to a full version game. Seeing as how Just Cause was released not that long ago, it really adds to the value of the card as whole.
No red PCB this but, but instead blue, which I’m totally content with. Instead of the small round chipset cooler of the other card, this one has a much larger powdered gray heatsink which covers not only the core, but the four front memory chips.
On cards with lower memory frequencies, the memory chips rarely get hot enough to warrant a heatsink, except with overclocking, so this is strictly for looks. If you wish to see a full res version of the image below, click here.
Both cards we are looking at today have a VGA, DVI and TV-out outputs.
While the X1050 utilized Hynix memory chips, this model uses Samsung… still GDDR2, however.
There are two versions of the X1550 on the market, from Sapphire and others. One includes a 64-Bit memory interface and the others use 128-Bit. Normally the price difference is within $2 – $5, so if you have a choice, make sure you get the 128-Bit model as the performance difference should be clear.
With that out of the way, let’s jump into installation and then test ’em out!