Sapphire ULTIMATE HD 7750 Pro Reviews

Sapphire's HD 7750 is a more ambitious attempt and it's one that will attract a select audience. The card is silent at all times - and that may be all that's required to catch the eye of quiet-computing aficionados - but it's presented in a bulky design that may not meet the requirements of certain HTPC enclosures.

A quiet and power efficient passively cooled graphics card, but it's not that compact and it's not especially fast either. If space isn't an issue, the similarly priced and previous generation but much faster Radeon HD 6850 is better value.

If you're going to be building an all out gaming beast, you probably will not and by all means should not, be using a passively cooled video card! In fact, you probably won't care about how much noise the card makes in the first place. However, if your machine's sole purpose is to be used in an HTPC, silence is key! Nobody wants to hear fans spinning while they're enjoying a movie, so for this purpose the Sapphire HD 7750 ULTIMATE is perfect! At $129, it does come in slightly more pricey than other HD 7750 video cards, but this is one of the few times when the price difference isn't such a big deal. Sure you could buy a cheaper card and replace that pesky stock cooler. But, that would probably just cost the same, if not more, than you would have spent on the HD 7750 ULTIMATE to begin with. This passively cooled card from Sapphire is ideal for any machine, where keeping everything as quiet as possible is more important than having the most powerful GPU available!

They took AMD's stock design and improved upon it by making it completely silent. They were able to do this without having to reduce performance either. All too often we've seen cards like this come out and they've had to reduce the performance in order keep them stable. This does have a lot to do with the way the GPU is manufactured, but it also has to do with the design of the heat sink. One thing to keep in mind though is that the only thing that's actually cooled by the heat sink is the GPU. This card really should have some indirect airflow to cool the ram chips and voltage regulators. These parts of the card can still get pretty hot and should be cooled to prolong the life of the card. A case with a side fan should be perfect for this job and most of these types of fans don't produce a lot of noise either. It might have been beneficial if Sapphire had installed ram sinks on these so that they would benefit more from indirect airflow. This is something that many users can do themselves though. It's also true that GDDR5 at these clock speeds really doesn't get all that hot anyway. This is just something to keep in mind for those that want to get the very most out of this card. This will also help overclocking performance as well. There aren't too many cards like this that have been produced, but this one is definitely the best that we've seen so far. Sapphire has done an excellent job of engineering this card and we hope to see this level of innovation from them with future products. If you need a card that makes no noise, and still has solid performance the new Sapphire Ultimate Silent HD 7750 may be just what you are looking for.