Quality of Sapphire cards?

[Mort]

I'm looking for a lower end Radeon card and notice I can't find any of
these made by ATI. I see a lot of cards made by Sapphire, but I'm not
familiar with that brand. Is the quality of Sapphire cards as good as ATI?

 

[Asestar]

Saphire is the BEST card you can buy, next to Ati. Infact they manufacture
cards for ati to sell with ATI logo. So I'd go for saphire without any
hasitation..

 

[Rockin Ronnie]

I'm looking for a lower end Radeon card and notice I can't find any of
these made by ATI. I see a lot of cards made by Sapphire, but I'm not
familiar with that brand. Is the quality of Sapphire cards as good as ATI?

Not sure about newer cards but I had a Sapphire Radeon 7500 and it had
slower memory than a "Built by ATI" card. When I bought my 9600pro I bought
a genuine ATI card just to eliminate the possibility of being stuck with
slower memory. Maybe things have changed!

Ron

 

[JTS]

Yep, they've changed.

ATI?

Not sure about newer cards but I had a Sapphire Radeon 7500 and it had
slower memory than a "Built by ATI" card. When I bought my 9600pro I bought
a genuine ATI card just to eliminate the possibility of being stuck with
slower memory. Maybe things have changed!

Ron

 

[Mike P]

I've had a Saphire 9500pro and now 9800np that isn't as good as my old BBATI
8500 or BBATI AIW9600pro for 2D (sharpness mostly). I'd say ATI on top then
other known (including Saphire) cards second in my experience. My first ATI
card after 3 nvidias was the orig. RadeonLE, never looked back.

Mike

 

[Sleepy]

Ive got a Sapphire 9100 128mb card - Its not a bad card except the fan
started to go faulty after only 6 months and after repeated requests to
Sapphire and the retailer I still couldnt get either to supply me a
replacement fan. The heatsink and fan on the GPU is a crappy stick-on job
rather than the standard 2-pin fitting and its a pig to replace. The 2-pin
one I could have replaced in half an hour. I've had fans go on a Geforce and
a Kyro so its a common occurence and both of those were 2-pin fittings
and easily sorted.

 

[DD]

I've had a Saphire 9500pro and now 9800np that isn't as good as my old BBATI
8500 or BBATI AIW9600pro for 2D (sharpness mostly). I'd say ATI on top then
other known (including Saphire) cards second in my experience. My first ATI
card after 3 nvidias was the orig. RadeonLE, never looked back.

Mike

Sapphire makes most of the ATI-branded cards. The reason your 9800np seems
lower quality than your 8500 is because the np is a lobotomized card, you
actually down-graded when you switched to it LMAO.

DD

 

[DD]

Sucks to be you, I've never has a GPU fan die since my original Voodoo2,
maybe you should stop buying bottom-of-the-line cards. It's like buying
cars; a Neon is not going to have the same quality as a Pacifica, a Focus is
going to need replacement parts before a Taurus, on average.

DD

 

[DD]

Sapphire makes most of ATI's "house-brand" cards.

Nuff sed.

DD

 

[Mike P]

You don't know much but at least you're happy in your world...

Mike

 

[Andrew]

Sucks to be you, I've never has a GPU fan die since my original Voodoo2,
maybe you should stop buying bottom-of-the-line cards.

A Voodoo 2 card with a fan on it?

 

[NightSky 421]

Sucks to be you, I've never has a GPU fan die since my original Voodoo2,
maybe you should stop buying bottom-of-the-line cards. It's like buying
cars; a Neon is not going to have the same quality as a Pacifica, a Focus is
going to need replacement parts before a Taurus, on average.

DD

Perhaps so, but it shouldn't be much to ask for a fan of reasonable quality.
By buying a lower-end card, you already pay for it by taking a performance
hit versus higher-end offerings. I think it's wrong to say that you should
have to put up with a fan that craps out after a few months because you
didn't want to fork out a few hundred dollars for a new video card.
Lower-end video cards make up much more of the market than high-end cards
do. At the very least, the fan should be easy to replace, which it wasn't
in Sleepy's case.

And yes, all of this is coming from someone who has owned a 9800 Pro since
the summer of last year.

 

[JTS]

He might not know much, but likely more than you. You are basing your
conclusions on a very limited sample of cards.
Todd

 

[Mike P]

I'm stating my opinion based on my experience as I stated, not claiming an
absolute. A 9800np has just as good IQ as the pro, same core and pcb just
slower memory so his statement is nonsense where mine isn't.
Also, Sapphire could build cards to ATI spec for them then build to their
own spec for their product as is often done in the automotive industry.
My conclusion is based on hard data, which I provided to show the scope of
it. Alternatively, the "sapphire is the best" claim I'm pointing out to be
suspect has a lot of assumptions in it.
So I guess you either don't know how to read or you have the same level of
intellect as DD.

Mike

 

[Oscar T Grouch]

:>
:>>Sucks to be you, I've never has a GPU fan die since my original Voodoo2,
:>>maybe you should stop buying bottom-of-the-line cards.
:>
:>A Voodoo 2 card with a fan on it?

Very possible. I had a pair of 12MB Voodoo 2 cards running in SLI
mode. They each had a fan/heatsink combo on them. I don't remember
who made the kit but they worked great. The system I was running back
then had every slot on the motherboard filled and I never had any
problems with the Voodoo 2 cards overheating.

OTG

PS: I've still got those 2 cards in the original boxes on a shelf out
in the garage with all my other "obsolete" computer hardware.

 

[The Chief]

I'm looking for a lower end Radeon card and notice I can't find any of
these made by ATI. I see a lot of cards made by Sapphire, but I'm not
familiar with that brand. Is the quality of Sapphire cards as good as ATI?

Just received my Sapphire Radeon 9600xt @ 128 mb (bulk) from NewEgg.
It's awesome. Better than the GF 5600XT that I had... for two days. I
RMA'd it.. it sucked. I did a lot of reading about the Sapphire and the
9600XT model as a whole and a lot of people said good things about it. I
bought it and I'm not disappointed at all. Mine has the Overdrive feature.

 

[J. Clarke]

Sapphire makes most of the ATI-branded cards. The reason your 9800np seems
lower quality than your 8500 is because the np is a lobotomized card, you
actually down-graded when you switched to it LMAO.

While the 9800np may be "lobotomized" it should still outperform an 8500 in
all areas. And the "lobotomization" should not have any effect at all on
sharpness unless in addition to "lobotomizing" they did some eye surgery as
well.

 

[Mike P]

It isn't lobotomized, that's the SE I presume he's mistakenly referring to .
The np is identical to the pro except for slower rated ram.

Mike

 

[J. Clarke]

It isn't lobotomized, that's the SE I presume he's mistakenly referring to
. The np is identical to the pro except for slower rated ram.

Regardless, sharpness is controlled by different factors from 3-d rendering
speed.

 

[Sham B]

Just because Sapphire make cards for ATI doesn't not mean that their own
brand cards are of the same quality. For example, the JVC and Technics
hi-fi equipment is made in the same factory by the same workers, but the
Technics brand is the 'higher quality JVC', and tend to have better parts in
them.

During a summer vacation holiday in the UK, I worked on an audio speaker
production line, where we would be building low quality Panasonic speakers
one week, and high quality Mordant-Short ones the next. The only thing that
really changed was the number of blemishes we had to look for before
rejecting an empty cabinet carcass (for the MS ones it was 'zero blemishes',
for the Panasonic, we were told to fill in small scratches with a black
crayon), and which box the speakers and muffler wadding came from. I
personally used to sneak the odd $300 Mordant short speaker set into some
$60 Panasonic speakers, because (a) It felt good and (b) getting caught
doing it meant the sack, so it broke up the boredom

Having said that, it seems that many recent batches of Sapphire cards are
simply rebadged ATI cards. It seems like the price differential between the
two sets of components is less that the cost of retooling the production
lines, and in many cases, its all ATI spec cards.

I think the upshot is that the Sapphire cards are likely be the same quality
as the ATI ones, but *this is not guaranteed*, because they are not defined
to the same spec, and the Sapphire ones may have slightly inferior memory,
depending on availability.

S