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Usually, one might expect a large bundle of extras when buying a graphics card. In this case however, Sapphire elected to include just the bare minimum when it came to extra goodies. This does help to keep the final price of the product down, so there is some advantage when not receiving a stack full of extra CDs and demo game DVDs. Here's what we found when the 1650 packaging was cracked open.

• The X1650 Pro Graphics Card (of course!)
• User Manual
• CyberLink DVD Player Software
• One VGA to DVI Adapter
• One S-Video to Composite Video Adapter
• One S-Video to RGB Composite Video Adapter
• One Composite Video Extension Cable

You do get what you need, but the absence of a driver CD kind of hurts, but Sapphire did make up for that with the engineering of the card.

The layout of the X1650 Pro is very clean, with practically no excess clutter. You can count only three capacitors to help clean up errant electric juice, indicating that the integrated circuitry of the card itself is well engineered. The deep sea blue PCB board is distinctive, but would be quite hidden within the confines of a case. The heat sink was the big surprise. As is the case with most card manufacturers, aluminum is the preferred metal of choice for those low to mid range cards. Sapphire chose to use the thermal transference advantages of copper in order to help facilitate better heat dissipation. That we like.

I would have preferred to have seen just a little more attention to detail when it came to the heat sink. The rough grained finish won't have an excessively debilitating effect upon cooling, but perfectly flat and perfectly polished finishes do work better. I know, I know, everyone says you need a grained finish to help hold the thermal grease and provide better thermal transference. But, two perfectly flat (or as flat as you can get them) surfaces will transfer heat far better than any thermal paste. How could this be you would ask? Believe it or not, a diamond has better thermal transference properties than any other material in existence. The incredibly tight lattice structure of the carbon molecules allow for the near perfect transmission of vibrations between atoms -- and when atoms and or molecules get hot they vibrate. Henceforth, the flatter and more uniform two surfaces are, the better the transference of heat, or energy between them is. Feel free to wow your friends with that little tid bit of intellectual prowess. Just remember to tell them where you heard it!

Hey! I've seen that before. Those fine little markings on the copper base of the 1650 heat sink are actually the laser etched text from the top of the GPU chip. It's not that the chip is failing or falling apart, but it's interesting how the etched portion of the chip will, in essence, burn its markings into the material of the heat sink. Where have I seen this before? A Dell server that I have at home. It's not a rack mount, just a simple full tower case with a 2.0 GHz Intel chip inside. It's nothing to ever worry about, but it is something neat to note.

Sapphire did do a fine job with this particular cooler though. The portion of the copper heat sink that comes into contact with the GPU has been raised. This allows for some added pressure to be applied to the chip, further aiding in heat transference.

There was one thing that really surprised me when I was pulling apart the X1650. As can be seen in the preceding photographs, Sapphire used a silver-based thermal paste. This paste may be Arctic Silver, or perhaps a unique blend of micronized silver produced by another manufacturer. Without a full scale laboratory, I couldn't say for certain -- but any silver-based paste will work far better than the plain old zinc-oxide paste or silicon paste that is more often employed. I tip my virtual hat to Sapphire for that one.

As for the rest of the cooler, an array of copper fins lay soldered to the underlying 1/16" copper plate. These fins provide an abundance of surface area to help pull away unwanted heat. A thin plastic shroud helps to direct air flow past these fins and out the rear exhaust. The single fan may only be 45mm in diameter, but it does move more than enough air. So all in all, the cooling of this card is more than sufficient. In fact, the cooling used closely follows ATI's cooler design for the X1600 Pro graphics cards, and their reference design for the new X1650 Pro design -- so you know that the method is sound.

On the back of the card, we find dual DVI connectors. This is quite nice, since ATIs new RV535 GPU revision does allow for dual DVI connectivity. The X1600 Pro cards also used dual DVI, as do other cards in that class. Beneath that standing however, you will begin to find cards with a single DVI and single VGA connector. It's great to see ATI engineer dual DVI into their reference design, and equally great to see Sapphire employ it with the X1650 Pro.

I think that we have seen so far that the X1650 Pro from Sapphire is simply a slight rebuild of the original ATI X1600 Pro reference design. There are a few modest improvements, but pure performance aspects have yet to be seen. It's time to fire up our video test bench system. Just give me a minute or so for it to boot up ...