Sapphire announced the availability of its new Radeon X1600 Pro card equipped with an HDMI connector, allowing owners to build their own HDMI equipped home theater PC.

The Sapphire Radeon X1600Pro HDMI card is now shipping and delivers both audio and video to HDMI compliant displays and televisions.

The X1600 series promises high performance in Shader Model 3.0 and enhanced image quality. The architecture also supports Avivo delivering vibrant high fidelity images and video playback to the latest High Definition (HD) video standards. The new HDMI version is a low profile PCI Express card which supports HDCP. HDMI and VGA outputs are available with a maximum supported resolution of 1080p via HDMI and 2048x1536 over VGA. The card ships with both standard and low-profile mounting brackets for use in standard or media center PC enclosures and allows either an external SPDIF or internal cable to be connected so that the audio signal is delivered over the HDMI cable. A standard VGA connector and DVI dongle also allow the connection of PC displays.



The Sapphire RADEON X1600Pro with its 12 Pixel pipelines provides the highest graphics performance in its class even for shader intensive gaming. Equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, this model features clock speeds of 500MHz (core) and 800MHz (memory). Crossfire ready, the X1600Pro HDMI card can be used together with any other X1600 series card in multi-GPU systems.

Retail versions of these new Sapphire graphics accelerators will ship with multimedia software including PowerDVD and Sapphire Select, the exciting new way to deliver a choice of games to the end user. Each card is bundled with a DVD containing a selection of top games from several leading software houses. The end customer can play each of the games for a one hour trial before choosing which titles he or she wants to keep and using the activation codes for those titles.

Availability is expected next week for around $155, and the card includes an HDMI to DVI adaptor.