Graphics card maker Sapphire has announced an AMD ATI Radeon X1950 Pro-based board that it pledged was not only on average five per cent faster than cards fitted with the same GPU but also much quieter too.

The Ultimate Edition X1950 Pro clocks the GPU to 580MHz and its 256MB of GDDR 3 video memory to 1.6GHz. Cooling comes courtesy of a Zalman heatpipe-based active-cooling unit and a separate memory-specific heatsink.

The X1950 Pro chip contains 36 pixel shaders and eight vertex shader. It supports AMD's Avivo video enhancement system, and the board is ready for CrossFire set-ups using the new internal connector. It also supports the HDCP copy-protection standard, so it's ready to play HD content at full resolution.

The Ultimate Edition X1950 Pro has a pair of 2,560 x 1,600 dual-link DVI ports and an s-video TV-out connector capable of running at up to 1,024 x 768, Sapphire said.

Sapphire didn't say when the board will ship or how much it will retail for, but the card will ship with a full version of Just Cause. ®