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The final card we’re looking at today is the Sapphire Radeon X800 GTO Ultimate. This takes real advantage of modest clock speeds on the GTO by fitting a passive heatsink. There’s also no external power connector at all on this board, which makes it easier to connect up but immediately knocks on the head any attempt at serious overclocking, though the passive heatsink wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.

In fact, even during standard benchmarking we found that the system powered itself off during benchmarking and we had to add an extra fan to keep things stable so it could get through it. This certainly defeats the purpose of a passive heatsink but in a properly set-up enclosed system air flow should be better.

Instead you’re given something of perhaps more appreciable value – silence. The heatsink is oval on one side and square on the other. Heatpipes draw excess heat away from the GPU on pass it over to the heatsink on the rear. This arrangement really increases the thickness of the card but though it’s a tight squeeze we managed to get it into an AOpen Xcube we had to hand.

Other than the large heatsink, the spec is the same as that of the Connect3D – 12 pixel pipelines, six vertex shaders and 256MB of GDD3 memory. There’s the same DVI, VGA and TV Out ports too, with Component, S-video and composite cables included.

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