Card appearance and thoughts
The sticker may say Sapphire on top but the heatsink on the ULTIMATE model is all Zalman. Sapphire's teamed up with the Korean cooling experts and pre-fitted the VF900-Cu aftermarket cooler. The all-copper cooler weighs in at 185g and uses established dual heatpipe technology allied to a slow-spinning 92mm fan for better-than reference cooling with near-silent operation. Should you wish to buy this to enhance the cooling on your graphics card, the VF900-Cu retail for around £25, albeit with a supplied fanmate for manual speed regulation.
Zalman claims a maximum rotation speed of the dual ball-bearing fan to be 2,400RPM which produces 25dBa. We observed that the fan was rarely pushed beyond the minimum 1,350RPM/18dBa setting, and our testing under full-load conditions suggests it lives up to the quietness claim. It's definitely a couple of notches lower on the decibel scale than the reference model's. Sapphire, however, doesn't pre-overclock the core: that's left up to you, but no appropriate software was provided in the bundle.
In terms of effective cooling of the RV570 core, we observed idle/load temperatures of 35C/50.5C which hold up well against the reference's 43C/68C performance, albeit with the latter run with ambient temperature a couple of degrees higher.
The side-on shot highlights the size of the cooler and the heatsinks on the power delivery and 1600MHz-rated RAM chips, which run at 200MHz above default. It's the kind of cooling modification an enthusiast would consider, so it's nice to see Sapphire listening to all corners of the market.
Enhanced cooling aside, the ULTIMATE edition is based on the same PCB as the regular card. You'll still need to connect it up to the PC's PSU for the juice a 16x PCIe slot cannot provide. Sapphire adds in the necessary adapter to do so, though.
The above photograph highlights the second heatpipe on the cooler, with the heatsink being large enough to obscure the adjacent expansion slot on your motherboard. Bear this in mind if your setup requires a single-slot graphics card.
Both dual-link DVI ports carry HDCP support, as per RV570 spec. There's no VIVO ASIC on this model, meaning the DIN socket in the middle provides TV-Out functionality only.
All the fun is on the other side. You can see how the Zalman cooler fits on top of the GPU. RV570's internal CrossFire can be inferred from the two golden fingers on the top-right of the card. You will need to connect both to opposing fingers on another RV570, should you wish, other hardware permitting, to take advantage of AMD's multi-GPU technology.
The ULTIMATE edition is pretty easy to explain. It's based on RV570 but Sapphire pre-attaches some enthusiast-orientated cooling and bumps up memory speed to 1600MHz. That tells you it will be faster than the regular-clocked model, by around 5% if you take Sapphire's word for it.
