SapphireTech has been advertising the "Ultimate Silent Partner" for a couple of months now. It was no real secret that Sapphire would equip their highend top model graphics card based on the ATI R350 VPU chip with a silent cooling unit as they did with their 9700 Pro Ultimate solution. One would think that Sapphire would have revealed the 9800 Pro Ultimate by now, but that has not been the case as of yet. Read more - photograph included!

We have learned that Sapphire is going to equip the 9800 Pro Ultimate with a Zalman heatpipe cooling solution similar to the ZM80C-HP just without the optional fan. This may be good news as you might be able to add the fan unit afterwards. Feature wise the 9800 Pro Ultimate is staying tight with the official ATI specs: 256MB DDRII Memory Core: 380Mhz Memory: 350Mhz (effective 700Mhz) DX 9 compatible ...