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15 yard penalty, anecdote of a single purchase does not equal evidence, just as your complaints about that ATI laptop from before the sale isn't "proof" that AMD, a separate company, doesn't support their products.

Sapphire offers 2 year warranties on their cards which is pretty standard for the graphics industry and their cards are reviewed highly by their customers with an average of 80% rating 4 stars or better, which again is pretty standard when it comes to GPUs.

And please stop blaming AMD for the fact you got a bad ATI product when AMD didn't even own the company at the time your IGP was sold. AMD drivers are just as solid as Nvidia, they wouldn't sell millions of cards if they weren't, and their support on both the Windows and Linux side I would argue is better because 1.- On Windows its trivial to use the older drivers on the latest version, such as the XP era 2400 Pro cards I have running in many an office building with Windows 7 and 2.- On the Linux side they've opened their specs and are paying the devs to work on the FOSS drivers with the goal of replacing the proprietary driver with a FOSS one. With Nvidia their hostility towards Linux is bad enough Linus flipped them the bird in sheer frustration.

In conclusion...one anecdote does not equal evidence, and one "badly supported" card by the no longer existing ATI (which it was pointed out several times by many people including myself how easy it was to get that card to run on any OS you wanted it to, you blew off any offers of assistance) does not say anything about the current state of AMD drivers in 2015.

i wouldn't mind having one of these things for a PVR/media center, except for the fact that it needs a one-slot cooler, meaning it probably runs hot and noisy.

Look at the pictures : the cooler looks rather small, and seems to be of the standard type that you find over most low-end GFX cards and some chipsets.

As long as there's sufficient air-flow in your HTPC, you could probably swap if for on of those heat-pipe based monstruosities that you can fit over standard GPU and use passive cooling or low noise big fan. (something like this)

Of course, given the standard shape, you could also put a water cooling block on it.

but seriously though, how much is this card going to cost? is it just for professional video processing or will there be other uses for it as well?

Well, I think this is going to be the tricky part.

On one hand IBM and company have gone through great effort to diversify and push their chip to as much as possible different usage (more product sold = cheaper to build) so I don't think it'll have as much problems as the PhysX chip had.

But on the other hand, the main usage for which this card is marketed for (accelerating HD decoding) is already supported by the hardware acceleration inside latest graphics card on the biggest market (Windows machines).
Most HTPC builder running Windows Media Center, will probably prefer to put in one of the latest HD-enabled GeForce or Radeon (or even the latest onboard Chrome from VIA), rather than having to buy two separate cards, one graphic card AND one HD accelerator.
Thus I don't know if there's going to be enough demand to drive the price low enough.
And that's bad for us Linux users, because we don't get such a good support for hardware decoding in graphics card, and developing it will be slow. Whereas the CELL based solution would be much more easy to tackle as there's already tons of code and tools for the CELL's SPUs.

Yes, built by Sapphire. Info here.

If you want Linux drivers, you have to let these companies know:

ASUS
Lenovo
HP
Power Color
HIS Tech
Sapphire

The suggested letter is:

Subject: Product Feedback

To whom it may concern,

I recently purchased one of your [graphics cards || notebooks || desktops] that had contained an ATI GPU. While I realize your products are catered toward Microsoft Windows users as they are your largest consumer base, I wish to use this product with Linux. I had used the [your model number for their product] with the ATI Linux drivers, and while they have improved a great deal recently, I still feel there is much room for improvement. The drivers in their current form run much slower under Linux than Windows, lack support for AIGLX (a visual desktop feature), and other features found within the Windows Catalyst drivers but not Linux.

I do realize you may not officially support Linux and that you have limited control over the development of these drivers, but I would kindly ask that you forward this comment to AMD and that you ask them to channel additional resources to the development of these drivers. In good time you should make Linux support from AMD a requirement. Another step that I would hope to see is including the ATI Linux display drivers on your support/driver CD. As the adoption of Linux on desktops continues to increase, I hope you are able to jointly improve your Linux presence with ATI/AMD.

[your name]

Their full press release is a word document.

While I know Openoffice can open it, can't these people use something more friendly?

Air is extracted from the case by an integral transparent blue LED fan, passed through the radiator and vented out of the case at the rear mounting bracket.

On Sapphire Technologies there is a little more info, but not much.

Also, Sapphire has been making fanless (or large, quiet fan) cards for some time as well. I have their Radeon 9800 XT Ultimate card and it is silent and yet still very fast. They have the latest and greatest in silent configuration as well:

http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/products/graphics_o verview.php?gpid=120

Actually, it is the midrange Toxic x700 that uses liquid mercury. I'd hate to see what Sapphire uses in the x600.

The graphics fan is the noisiest component in my case. Those Gigacube Radeon 9600 XT Extremes are damn loud.

There are Radeon 9600 XT (well, even up to 9800XT actually) cards with passive cooling, probably bit more expensive than their regular counterparts with small whiny loud as hell fans, though.

To be fair, the ATi-branded cards are currently produced by Sapphire.

I recently bought a Sapphire card, a Radeon 9200, from Newegg.com. According to the DRI status document, Radeons up the 9200 are supported. I wasn't able to get the card to work with XFree86 v4.2.0, but it works in 2D with 4.3.0. 3D, however, doesn't work with 4.3. I've tried to check out the latest DRI trunk via CVS, but checkouts (and updates) always hang in the same place, at xc/xc/util/patch. Does anyone have any suggestions? Should I try the binary driver at dri.sf.net? I've tried the ATI FireGL binary drivers, but they've just hung the system. I'm running 2.4.19 with the preemptible kernel patch. Should I get on the dri-users mailing list and ask there? Google searches haven't turned up much. Thanks for any help.

Just in case you weren't aware of it, Sapphire makes a Radeon 9700 Pro with no fans. Mmmmm, quiet and fast. Mmmmmmm.

Atlantis 9700 Pro Ultimate

Sapphiretech is able to build a state-of-the-art ATI Radeon 9700 Pro without any active cooling. Seems nearly unbelievable if you compare these to the new FX cooling monsters.

Check it out for yourself.

Combine these with a good, noise dampened case, Verax coolers and a Barracuda V and you should get a PC that is much more quiet than most of the PCs on the market and faster than these too.

Bye egghat.