Sapphire

At Sapphire you could see two new HDMI + HDCP capable video cards. The card is a Radeon X1300 with additional logic chips on the PCB that allow the addition of audio which is supplied via SPDIF to be mixed into the HDMI stream. Other solutions, for example a DVI to HDMI converter can neither do HDCP nor audio. The audio input is just an input, it's not an extra sound card.


The yellow connector is the SPDIF input for the audio signal multiplexing. The VGA connector is there for backward compatibility and to make system installations easier, because not all TVs may run at text mode resolutions.


Here you can see the chips Sapphire uses. The big chip on the top is the Silicon Image Sil1930 HDMI transmitter. Below that is an Atmel 8051 microcontroller which is running a custom software that controls the transmitter chip.


In order to make it easier for the visitors to realize what difference HDMI makes, these two TVs were showing the same video. The top TV was connected via HDMI and the bottom TV was running via SCART, which uses a composite signal. Even though you can't see the difference on the photos, in reality the difference was like night and day. These video cards will be available in 2-3 weeks for a price of around $150-170 with 2m HDMI cable included. An AGP version is planned and may become available in the near future.


Another novelty was the Sapphire Blizzard cooling. Sapphire uses a customized version of the Thermaltake Tidewater (our review here). Beyond the visual changes, the fan has been improved, so that it is a lot quieter on the fast setting.
This completely self-contained, pre-filled, maintenance-free system should be an easy way for enthusiasts to get more overclock out of their cards, without losing their warranty. Of course the price will also be very competitive - cheaper than buying the Tidewater and installing it yourself I hear. Right now this is available for the X1900XTX only, but if demand is there, there will be X1800 based Blizzard products as well. A Crossfire version is not possible because there is not enough space for two if these coolers in most cases.


Also on display was this 512 MB USB stick which is supposed to go on the market with an aggressive pricing, but still using high-performance components.