Sapphire Builds All R430/R480 Cards !

We managed to find out that in these early days of Radeon X800 vanilla, X800 XL and X850, Sapphire has managed to secure a very nice contract.

For those of you who don't know, Sapphire is building most ATI based cards. There is another firm called Celestica which has also built cards for ATI and its partners.

But it appears Sapphire has won this round and is producing all X850 and new PCIe X800 cards based on the R430 core. Asus and MSI could make their own cards but it might cost them too much to produce their own printed circuit boards (PCBs), and put them together.

Sapphire, on the other hand, builds the cards for Dell and other OEMs. In this case, Sapphire is acting as a contracting company working for ATI, which then sells those cards back to who ever wants them.

Other partners can produce slower and not so complex boards such as X700, X600, X300, 9600, 9550, 9250, 9200. And these cards can actually be different from the reference design, if a partner decides to. We saw with our own eyes that Abit was producing Radeon 9600 PRO cards in its factory in China.

Source : TheInquirer