Packaging:

Retail front	Retail back	Shhh	ID tag
Hiding	Included items	CD's and manual	Cables/Adapters

    The packaging for the X1650PRO is not as elaborate as the 1950PRO box, which was plastic. The Sapphire Ultimate X1650PRO comes in the standard paper box with some embossed areas, as well as a picture of the female Sapphire character on the front. The back of the box has some product highlights and not much else. Let's open up the box and see what's included with the graphics card.

Front	Dual DVI	Side
NTSC/PAL jumper	Heatpipe View	Copper heatsink
Back showing Rad	Passive cooling	Soldered together

   The box is not what we are interested in; it's what's in the box, and that is the Sapphire Radeon X1650PRO Ultimate Silent Series graphics card. The Silent Series of cards means they are fanless; in other words, instead of a fan to help with cooling, they use large heatsinks with heatpipes. No fan mean less noise, but no fan also means a larger heatsink that can take up space and cause clearance issues with other components. Now with the card in hand, let's quickly go over its layout. The top of the card is not cluttered at all, since it's missing a cooling fan and some ducting. The front portion has dual DVI with a TV-out connecter in the middle. The back side of the card looks like a cheese grater with the large heatsink that spans the length of the card. The specially developed heatpipe based passive cooler features two large 8mm heatpipes and a radiator array with 63 aluminum fins. The heatpipes are soldered to a copper base that makes contact with the GPU.

    Under the heatsink we have 600Mhz ATI GPU which has 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process, twelve pixel shader processors, four Pixel Pipelines, five vertex shader processors, Dual-Link DVI support, and some other fine features too numerous to mention.

    Flanking the GPU on two sides are four DDR3 RAM modules for a total of 256MB, and a memory clock of 1400MHz. The modules used are Infineon hyb18h512321af-13. Unfortunately, the Infineon website doesn't have a listing for the AF-13 modules. What they have are AF-12 which are 800MHz and AF-14 which are 700MHz, so does that make the AF-13's 750MHz? I have no clue and will leave that question for you to answer.