Sapphire already has a reputation for producing fast, overclocked graphics cards based on ATI designs, and is well on the way to getting the same reputation when it comes to silently-cooled cards, with several designs in the product line-up already. One of the latest additions to this range is the Radeon X1650 Pro Ultimate, based - unsurprisingly - around the X1650 Pro and built on an attractive blue PCB.

Instead of the normal heatsink and cooling fan of the reference design there is just a small, simple heatsink that barely covers the GPU, while all the memory chips are left uncovered and cooled by the outside world. The only clue to what's going on is the pair of 8mm heat pipes disappearing around the back of the card. These pipes are soldered onto a copper base plate which sits on top of the GPU.

Follow these pipes around the back of the card and you are confronted by a monster of an aluminium heatsink covering half the rear of the card. To give you an idea of how big the heatsink is, it uses 63 cooling fins. It's so big, in fact, that you may have to check you have enough clearance between the PCI-E graphics slot and any other hardware (e.g. extra Molex power connectors, etc.) on your motherboard.

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The X1650 Pro GPU (RV530) has 157 million transistors with just four pixel pipelines and five vertex shaders and the core running at 600MHz. Sapphire has kept the core clock at reference speed and the 256MB of GDDR3 is clocked at 700MHz (1,400MHz effective). The Infineon HYB18H512321AF-13 memory chips strangely do not appear on Infineon's current product list, but from what is listed they would appear to be rated around 750MHz. But given that they are uncovered, you won't be able to push them much anyway, even if you were thinking about doing a touch of overclocking with the X1650 Pro Ultimate.

The back plate of the card provides the now standard pair of dual-link DVI ports along with the video out connector.

In terms of performance, this card gives reasonable results when benched with two of the favoured games around; Half-Life 2 and F.E.A.R. When tested at 1,024 x 768 pixels with all filtering turned off but all gaming detail set to maximum, it returned a figure of 54fps in Half-Life 2, while F.E.A.R gave an average fps (frames per second) score of 62 with the same constraints.

As with all Sapphire cards you get an impressive bundle of cables and software; RCA video adapter and extension cable, RGB cable, two DVI-to-VGA adapters, driver CD and PowerDVD 6. With the X1650 Pro Ultimate Edition Sapphire has bundled a full game - Just Cause (on DVD) - and not the Sapphire Select demo disk.

If you are building a quiet, all-purpose PC without the emphasis on gaming, yet want some games playing capability, then Sapphire's Radeon X1650 Pro Ulimate Edition is a good choice. But - and it's a fairly significant but - make sure your motherboard has room for it.