Sapphire Radeon X1050 Graphics Card

Introduction:

    To date I have reviewed just about every Sapphire ATI card that has been released in the last year, from the low end up to the high end cards. Today we are going to look at the new entry level ATI card from Sapphire named X1050. This entry level budget card still uses some of the latest technology, like hardware acceleration of MS Vista 3D environment. ATI Catalyst Control Center and Hydravision on the software end, and DX9.0c and OpenGL on the card offer a lot of control and adjustments of the card's features, like the support for dual monitors. So let's see how well this entry level card can perform.

About the Company:

    Pioneers in a new era of how data is displayed and games are played, Sapphire shepherds the performance oriented with ground-breaking solutions to an environment that remains in a constant state of flux and ultimate evolution. For over ten years Sapphire has held true to its unwavering commitment, the commitment to deliver the most feature rich and soundly engineered products. Because of Sapphire's firm position on achieving excellence with each product that leaves our ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factories, you can rest assured that your customers will recognize YOUR commitment to selling only the highest of quality components.
 
    "Sapphire is ATI's largest and best performing partner World Wide" Dave Orton, CEO ATI

Specifications:

• ATI RADEON™ X1050 Core (400MHz)

• 128MB / 256MB DDR2 (666MHz) or DDR (400MHz)

• PCI Express x16

• 64 or 128-bit Memory Bus

• TV-Out

• HDTV compatibility

• Hydravision 3

• Acceleration of: MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9

Features:

• Programmable VPU, pixel and vertex shaders

• Quad-pipe architecture and 2 geometry engines for cinema-quality graphics

• 2x/4x/6x full-scene antialiasing modes

• Compatible with MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-3, MPEG-4, WMV and AVI video formats

• DirectX 9.0 support for cinema-quality images

• DVI, S-video and composite video TV outputs

• Windows Vista compatible

• Includes installation software, drivers and utilities

Packaging:

Retail Front	Zot Posing	Requirements
In the Box	Manual	Included CD's

    Like most of the Sapphire retail boxes, some sort of character is on the front. The character on the box this time is Zot. The back of the box gives some product highlights on the card, and the one side panel has the system requirements. Let's open up the box and see what's included with the graphics card.

• RCA Video adapter

• Drivers CD

• PowerDVD 6

• 4 Game Trial CD

• Setup manual

A Closer Look:

X1050

Back Side

Plugs

RCA Adapter

    OK, time to remove the card from the box and see what we've got. The first thing I noticed is the size of the X1050, in particular how much smaller it is compared to some of the other cards. Another small item on the card is the fan, which is 60mm in size. Four RAM modules sit on the front side of the card around the GPU, and the other four are on the back of the card. None of the RAM modules have heatsinks on them. The plugs on the outside consist of one DVI and one VGA ports, along with the TV out plug that needs the adapter to convert the plug on the card to a RCA plug.

Fan

GPU

    Under the heatsink fan is the 400MHz ATI RV370 GPU which was used on X300, X550 and X600 cards. With a new BIOS the card becomes the X1050, now eliminating three of the older card names. Is this an attempt to clean things up for future releases? Only time will tell. I'm sure a lot of you want more details on why ATI is doing this. I'm not going to answer that here; this is a review on the Sapphire X1050 and not about the numbers game that ATI and Nvidia do to us.

4 of the 8 RAM Chips

RAM Up Close