The Ultimate (Continued)

All of that ‘active cooling’ business goes out the window with Sapphire’s ATLANTIS PRO Ultimate, as the card’s most distinguishing characteristic is its biggest feature. That is, Sapphire has implemented an oversized passive cooler to compensate for the absence of a cooling fan. It isn’t just any cooler, either. The card features Zalman’s ZM80 series VGA Heat Pipe Cooler. The heat sink assembly is comprised of a large front and a comparably sized back section. A gold plated copper heat pipe connects the two sections, transferring heat through a constant condensation – evaporation cycle, as explained in our ABIT Siluro GF4 Ti4200 OTES Review.


Rather than use copper though, which possess more ideal thermal transfer properties, the large heat sink is made of less-expensive aluminum. This doesn’t seem to impact performance too much, as we took measurements under load (3D Mark 2001 SE loop) to test the card’s thermal characteristics. Using a Raytek ST30, we measured the front of the card at 130 degrees Fahrenheit, while the back was a slightly cooler 123 degrees. The memory heat sinks also measured a toasty 130 degrees.

RAM sinks on memory

Another heatsink shot

Zalman’s website wisely advises anchoring the AGP card to your chassis with a screw as the whole assembly weighs in at nearly 400g. We’re not surprised though, as the heatsink provides more than 1,000 square centimeters of surface area to dissipate heat. On a related note, the back of the cooler comes awfully close to the DIMM slots on a couple of our motherboards. We didn’t see any problems, but if your motherboard doesn’t offer much room between the DIMM and AGP slots, you might want to be extra careful.

Not much space on the A7V8X, but it fits

RAM sink comes close to interfering with the DIMM, but it fits

Plenty of room for the nForce2-based A7N8X Deluxe