Sapphire, ATI's 100% partner

Recently, Adrian Thompson - director for international marketing, Sapphire Technologies - visited Russia. It is not accidental that the arrival of Adrian Thompson concurred with ATI's official announcement of new-generation 3D GPUs of Radeon X1000 series. That event, so significant for the world's IT industry wasn's passed over by the Russian representation office of Sapphire Technologies, and in particular a briefing for journalists was held to listen to the company's current affairs and plans for the future.

Adrian Thompson,
Sapphire's director for international marketing

We can make the readers of Digital-Daily.com happy: not only did Adrian Thompson visit our office at the office of Alena Andrianova, Sapphire's marketing manager in Russia and Ukraine, and Konstantin Martynenko, Sapphire's manager for technical marketing in Russia and Ukraine, - he also agreed to answer a number of our questions, which made up this interesting interview.

Photo taken at 3DNews.ru test lab (from left to right):
Adrian Thompson (Sapphire),
Anton Polyakov, 3DNews.ru editor-in-chief,
Alena Andrianova (Sapphire),
Konstantin Martynenko (Sapphire)

It was especially interesting to talk with the representatives of the company on the eve of the announcement of new-generation chips ATI Radeon X1000 for which Sapphire is building special plans. In the circle of a friendly talk we discussed all the aspects of Sapphire's activities - marketing plans, plans for releasing novelties, outlooks for the Russian market, and a lot more.

To be fair, we note that this visit of Adrian to Russia is far not the first. For several times already the visit of Sapphire Technologies director for international marketing is dated for the announcement of new company's products, which happened just this time.

Born in New Zealand, Adrian is currently living with his family in France. His life credo sounds about like this: "I can replace a video card, I can replace a computer and buy a new car, but nothing can be a substitute for my family. So the family safety is of topmost priority". That is why Adrian's wife, despite the high price for petrol, drives the monstrous Land Cruiser and not a small-cylinder car.

Before his coming to Sapphire Technologies. Adrian Thompson showed himself a talented specialist, he even had worked at NVIDIA. So it's all pleasure to talk to him about technology in general and Sapphire products in particular. Like on any topic, because most men of his age have seen a lot in his life and can tell many ingenious and instructive stories. In fact, a real boon for a company.

3DNews.ru: Adrian, we appreciate you for your time. The first question is traditional one: please tell the readers about Sapphire company. We all are very well aware of Sapphire produce, and it would be curious to know more about the structure.

А. Thompson: I believe it won't be a discovery for anyone that Sapphire Technologies is one of the most important and largest suppliers of graphic cards and motherboards based on ATI chips all over the world. Not only does our company develop but also produce a complete spectrum of products based on the chips by ATI Technologies - from video cards of the Radeon 9250 class for mass computers to the latest super-boards Radeon X1000; from cheap motherboards for mass PCs up to high-performance solutions aimed at systems with support for ATI CrossFire.

All the produce of Sapphire stands out with a high level of quality, and Sapphire produce rightfully enjoys a deserved popularity among computer manufacturers all over the world due to our ability to follow the latest trends on the market and manufacture products in great quantities.

For over ten years by now, Sapphires has been shipping the most functional and technically advanced products onto the market. Sapphire is permanently striving for attaining high quality standards for each product manufactured at factories certified under ISO9001 and ISO14001 standard, so you can stay assured that components you buy are of topmost quality.

3DNews.ru: Judging by the produce assortment, for many years Sapphire has used graphic chips, chipsets and other chips solely made by ATI Technologies. Such consistent policies by Sapphire deserve much respect. Nevertheless, does the Sapphire's management have any plans to change the status quo at least for the motherboards?

A. Thompson: I can tell it with full responsibility that Sapphire has been a devoted and consistent partner of ATI. All the produce based on ATI chips manufactured by Sapphire are made in compliance with all the requirements of ATI, including quality control and outgoing inspection. The factory of Sapphire has always been a largest supplier of ATI boards for most part of the companies within the first top ten world's manufacturers of PCs. Why look for other manufacturing partners if we are fully satisfied by ATI produce?

We do not rule out a possible future cooperation with other manufacturers of components, but for the time being we can state with confidence: Sapphire is ATI's 100% partner.

3DNews.ru: The next question relates to making the Sapphire's brand. Current product lines TOXIC, PURE and others have quite aggressive and overly energetic appearance. The all-known striped little person, judging by the anatomy is a lady extraterrestrial which has taken a firm place on most boxes of Sapphire produce, on the company's web site, and are even seen in the design of cooling systems on most recent graphic cards. Are you not afraid that the not so ordinary look of the lady may scare some buyers away from the Sapphire brand?

Sapphire's lady extraterrestrial

А. Thompson: Not at all. Since most of our best known retail products are aimed at use in high-end systems, that is, in the computers of explicit gaming bias, we believe our lady extraterrestrial will be adequately perceived by this most advanced category of buyers. If you are curious to take a look at the appeal of our lady extraterrestrials [at that moment Adrian goes deep into the bottoms of his notebook], you can stay assured: our lady extraterrestrials are the best! See for yourselves:

Sapphire's lady extraterrestrials living on the Earth

Sapphire's lady extraterrestrials living on the Earth

3DNews.ru: Well, indeed we have to admit you are ready for the most ticklish questions. OK. It's high time we moved to questions that disturb our readers regarding new products by Sapphire.

We know the company's graphic cards very well and see that Sapphire's motherboards are getting increasingly popular. But unfortunately the Russian buyer has a poor idea of your multimedia products - in particular, with universal tuners of the Theatrix series on the ATI Theater 550 PRO core and support for MPEG-2, Dolby Digital, FM Radio. Are there any specific plans regarding expansions in Russian with this part of the company's produce? What are your estimates of the potentials of Russia's market in this regard?

А. Thompson: Every year, Sapphire Technologies is expanding its presence on the markets of Russia, Ukraine, and other ex-USSR countries. While originally Sapphire offered in Russia only its high-end produce, we now have close contacts with not only distributors and retail resellers but also with a great number of system integrators.

We are closely studying the dynamically growing market of PCs and for the future we have some far-reaching plans regarding supplies of our multimedia products not only as retail devices but also as components for home and office digital systems. At least, all is being done to explore the prospects for our presence in this sector.

3DNews.ru: Moving to the talk about motherboards, let's first of all help our readers sort out with the marking of Sapphire produce.

A. Thompson: The marking of Sapphire motherboards is easy enough even to the most unsophisticated consumer. I am repeating it that for our produce we use solely ATI's chipset, so the marking of the boards gives a transparent clue to the name of the chipset used.

All Sapphire's motherboards are divided into the four categories – Innovation, CrossFire, Performance, and Element, with each category representing a sector of the market. While the first two categories, Innovation and CrossFire, are aimed at building the most powerful boards of approximate retail price $179 and $119, respectively, the Performance series of the price about $89 appears to be solutions for the mainstream class, and the Element of the price about $69 is aimed at the entry-level systems.

The name of a Sapphire board can be examined on a typical example - PI-A9 RS480, where PI stands for Pure Innovation, A9 – Socket 939, RS480 is the respective name of the version of ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. Therefore, a board aimed at Socket 478 for an Intel processor will be marked as I4, LGA75 – I7, and AMD Socket 754 – as A7. The suffices denoting chipsets are changed accordingly - RS400, RD400, RC410, or RS480, RX480, RX482, and additional ending may be added: M stands for the form factor mATX, and B – for the form factor BTX. That's about all of the intricacies.

3DNews.ru: Quite recently, Sapphire started promotion of its motherboards on the new PURE line. What is special about this series?

A. Thompson: The new generation of Sapphire's motherboards promoted in the Pure series fully fits within the above classification of target groups - Innovation, CrossFire, Performance, and Element. To some extent, motherboards of the Pure series can be called a quintessence implementation of ATI's technologies in practice.

Sapphire Pure motherboards are presented by the two lines: Pure – for AMD processors, and Pure II – for Intel processors. In the most performance-oriented Pure Innovation class aimed primarily at the advanced users and overclockers, we have presented the ATX motherboard Pure Innovation PI–A9RX480 built on the chipset combination ATI Express 200 (RX480) + SB450 for AMD Socket 939 processors.

This board is aimed at operation with AMD processors of series Sempron, Athlon64, FX, and X2, offers support for the dual-channel DDR400 memory, PCI-Express x16 bus, offers two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots, eight USB 2.0 ports, two modern ports for SATA-II (RAID 0, 1) storage and four SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1. There are also IEEE1394 ports, Gigabit LAN, 7.1-channel HDA (Azalia). Pure Innovation PI–A9RX480 offers the most flexible BIOS settings, as well as system-wide tuning to attain the maximum performance with the stability preserved.

The Pure CrossFire series is presented by two novelties in the ATX form factor. The version Pure CrossFire II PC-I7RD400 built on the combination RD400 + SB450 is aimed at operation with Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 processors with support for FSB 533, 800, or 1066 MHz, 2-channel DDR400 memory, offers two PCI-E x16 slots as should be for the CrossFire technology, as well as two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports, support for SATA RAID 0, 1, 8-channel HD Audio, 10/100 and GBit LAN, IEEE1394 ports, etc.

The CrossFire version for Socket 939 AMD processors is presented by the PC-A9RD480 board built on the combination RD480 + SB450 having approximately similar characteristics.

The Performance series is also presented by two boards in the ATX form factor: the version Pure Performance II PP-I7RS400 built on the chipset combination RS400 + SB400 for LGA775 P4 processors, and the Pure Performance PP-A9RS480 series built on the combination RS480 + SB400 for Socket 939 AMD chips. The special feature of both these boards is the full-featured graphic core ATI Radeon X300 integrated into the chipset together with the full-featured PCI Express x16 bus, as well as an implementation of 6-channel audio, and GBit LAN.

Finally, the mass series Pure Element which currently is made up of two boards in the mATX form factor. These are Pure Element II PE-I7RC410M built on the combination RC410 + SB400 for Socket 775 P4 processors, and Pure Element PE-A7RS482M on the combination RS482 + SB400 for Socket 754 AMD processors. These boards also feature in the availability of integrated graphic core ATI Radeon X300, as well as support for the single-channel DDR400 memory, a PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI slots, SATA RAID 0, 1, 6-channel Audio, and 10/100 MBit LAN.

Therefore, Sapphire covers not only the whole possible spectrum of retail demand but also any demands of system integrators in the most recent and powerful motherboards.

3DNews.ru: So, we have got to the most dainty part – Sapphire's graphic cards. However, before we move on to the elaboration of current line of 3D cards, we'd like to ask a few more marketing questions. In particular, we'd like to hear your estimation of the marketing appeal for the ATI CrossFire product line. Will the product line be a niche offering, or it will gain a wider occurrence rather than NVIDIA's SLI for example?

A. Thompson: No doubt, such powerful and far not the cheapest solutions like ATI CrossFire series are always aimed at a certain sector of the buyer's activity. I would not call a niche offering - it's rather a stable target group of enthusiasts always fluctuating within 5% to 10% of the overall demand for graphic cards.

As regards the appeal of the ATI CrossFire product line, I'd like to note that these solutions offer support for most varied rendering modes of load balancing between two video cards - the SuperTiling, Scissor, and Alternate Frame Rendering modes, including support for Super AA (8x, 10x, 12x, and 14x AA). Along with that, you should not forget that to use the ATI CrossFire mode, you don't have to buy two special cards - the second card may be a regular mass solution of the same class as the master card with the CrossFire Compositing Engine chip.

It is still premature to talk about the wide occurrence of such solutions, but we at Sapphire are confident in that the CrossFire technology will be widespread significantly. Signs of that are seen from the powerful support for ATI CrossFire by manufacturers, and consumers showing a permanent interest to that.

3DNews.ru: It is very interesting to know about the fate of super-quiet Sapphire video cards with classical technologies of passive cooling. What is the demand for these technologies, and what interesting is expected in that in the nearest future?

A. Thompson: We at Sapphire are happy about the volumes of demand for our super-quiet graphic solutions. The success of introduction of passive cooling technologies is seen from the fact that many players on the 3D graphic market have started mastering these promising technologies. Currently at Sapphire new cooling technologies are being developed by a dedicated team of engineers, and in due time we'll definitely demonstrate new generations of super-quiet cooling systems.

3DNews.ru: Quite recently, Sapphire presented entirely new overclocking-friendly 3D cards - X800GTO ULTIMATE and X800GTO FIREBLADE. How have the buyers estimated the release of these novelties?

A. Thompson: Sapphire can afford to develop and release unique graphic solutions of the class X800GTO ULTIMATE and X800GTO FIREBLADE, since first of all we work in close contact with ATI in terms of solving engineering issues, and secondly, we have unique developments aimed at providing operational safety of high-end video cards, e.g. due to the overclocking utility TRIXX.

The video cards Sapphire RADEON X800GTO ULTIMATE 256MB GDDR3 which use noiseless cooling system based on a heat pipe offer standard clock speed 400 MHz for the core and 490 MHz (980 MHz) for the memory.

Using the bundled Sapphire TRIXX overclocking utility, these clock speeds can be increased to 520 MHz/500 MHz or even higher depending on the overall system performance.

The version Sapphire RADEON X800GTO Fireblade equipped with a standard 2-slot and a fan removing hot air outside the housing, offers 256 MB of 256-bit GDDR3 memory of 1.6 ns access time and similar clock speeds: 400 MHz/490 MHz (980 MHz).

On this model, the TRIXX utility can increase the clock speeds to 550 MHz/540 MHz and higher.

Another model, Sapphire RADEON X800GTO 128MB, is equipped with 256-bit DDR1 memory in BGA packages, offers standard clock speeds 400 MHz/350 MHz (700 MHz DDR). This card is interesting for its competitive price, and using the overclocking utility the clock speeds can be raised to 520 MHz/380 MHz.

No doubt, the emergence of X800GTO ULTIMATE and X800GTO FIREBLADE cards has found wide response among overclockers and confirmed gamers, especially because concurrently with supply of these models Sapphire launched the Sapphire Select campaign shipping retail versions with a marvelous collection of games where the end user himself chooses the games of interest. Each card is bundled with a DVD with a selection of games by leading manufacturers. The user can play each of the games within an hour before deciding upon which ones to use and use activation codes. The package bundle of Sapphire Select is also up-to-date with cards of ATI Radeon X1000 series.

3DNews.ru: Here we got to the key event of this autumn - emergence of graphic cards based on the most recent generation of ATI's 3D chips - Radeon X1000. What are the features of implementation in this generation of graphics by Sapphire, will the dates of shipment be different from those announced by ATI?

A. Thompson: Releasing a new series of Radeon Х1000 graphic accelerators onto the market, Sapphire Technology traditionally didn't restrict to replicating the reference design and offered its unique development for each of the new product lines. The table below lists the main specifications of the novelties.