A Closer Look

Sapphire's cooler does not cool the memory. There is no contact between the memory chips and the cooler base.


After removing the cooler I saw this mess of thermal paste on the GPU. I find it surprising that the card even worked at all, considering several capacitors were fully covered in thermal paste.


This is the X1300 XT and the X1650 Pro side by side. As you can see it's the same PCB. Both cards share the same GPU and memory type so the performance differences should be almost non-existent.


The PCB number is exactly the same like on the X1650 Pro, 109-A67131-00A.


Sapphire uses 1.3 ns GDDR3 memory from Infineon with the model number HYB18H512321AF.


After a lot of cleaning up, this is the GPU core. Unfortunately it does not have a product name marking. But the GPU is either RV530 or RV535 which is an 80nm die shrink version.