Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro Company: Sapphire
Introduction: It hasn't been that long since ATI released the R350 core based on the .13-micron manufacturing process. The new chip is aimed at the mainstream market and provides some nice features such as DirectX 9 support as well as 8x AGP. The 9600 Pro cards come in clocked at 400 MHz core and 300 MHz memory. Although the speeds are faster than the 9500 Pro cards, the actual performance is closer to the 9500 (non Pro) cards because the 9600 Pro has four rendering pipelines versus the eight on the 9500 Pro. The 9600 Pro is a definite competitor with the GeForce FX5600 Ultra, although we do not have a FX5600 Ultra to compare. Check out a few other reviews and you will see exactly how close the competition is with the NVIDIA card. There are a few manufacturers who are using the ATi R350 chip and today we take a look at Sapphire's version of the 9600 Pro. The Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro comes bundled with some really nice features such as TV-out, Redline overclocking software, and a full version of Soldier of Fortune II. Sapphire has been a big supporter of ATi graphics chips, making cards based solely on ATi's chips. If you are interested in other cards made by Sapphire but using a different chip like the 9700 Pro, follow this link to view all the video solutions by Sapphire. With ATi and NVIDIA once again in a heated battle, it will be interesting to see as we get more cards in how FX series will compare to ATi's latest cards. At the moment, as we stated earlier, we do not have a lot of cards to compare, so bear with us. As time rolls on we will be able to better compare the cards but for now, you'll just have to do without the FX line. With all that being said, let us move on and see what the Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro has to offer to the mainstream market.
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