Sapphire and Korean cooling specialists Zalman have a relationship that spans a number of years, which resulted in Sapphire's Ultimate range of silent graphic cards. More recently, with the launch of its X800 series of cards, Sapphire switched to Artic Cooling for its range of Toxic over-clockable performance cards, but with the launch of the X800XL Ultimate, Sapphire has returned to its older partner.

A native PCI-Express card, the X800XL Ultimate is comparable to the AGP X800 Pro, but with a small increase in performance. At the heart of the X800XL Ultimate lies ATI's R430 graphics core which uses a 110nm manufacturing process and has a transistor count of 160 million. The core supports 16 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex shaders and has a 256-bit memory interface.

The core is clocked at 400MHz while the 256MB of 2.0ns Samsung memory runs at 490MHz DDR; an effective speed of 980MHz, all of which gives a memory bandwidth of 31.36GB/s.
As with the X800XL, Sapphire's Ultimate doesn't need a power connector, partly due to the use of GDDR3 memory which uses less power than its DDR2 predecessor, so the overall power consumption of the card is less than the 75W the PCI-E slot provides.

While the cooler on Sapphire's original X800XL isn't exactly huge, for the Ultimate it has been replaced by one of Zalman's VF700 heatsink/fan units. Most Zalman fans can be almost considered works of art and the VF700 is no exception.

Based along the same lines as Zalman's flower design of CPU cooler, the cooler is constructed from aluminium with the razor-thin cooling fins arranged in a semi-circle above and below the 80mm cooling fan, anodised blue to match the colour of the card's PCB, making for an attractive looking package. The fan not only cools the GPU but the rest of the top surface as well, and runs very quietly even when set to spin at its highest speed.

Performance-wise the X800XL Ultimate does well. At a 1,024 by 768 resolution it gives a 3DMark05 score of 5,350, but more meaningfully it produced frame rates for FarCry and Half Life 2 of 73.4fps and 49.33fps respectively; not bad when you consider that both games were tested with details set to maximum.

The software bundle comprises two games; SplinterCell Pandora and Prince of Persia, and there's also a copy of CyberLink's PowerDVD and Sapphire's RedLine overclocking utility.

Sapphire's X800XL Ultimate should be on your wanted list of graphics cards if you want to build a quiet PC with good gaming performance, as it offers the benefits of both; performance and low noise.