Industry Computer hardware Headquarters Hong Kong | Website www.sapphiretech.com Founded 2001 | |
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Products Motherboards
Graphics Cards Profiles | ||
Sapphire Technology (Chinese: 藍寶科技) is a Hong Kong-based technology company, founded in 2001, which produces graphics cards for personal computers and workstations, motherboards, TV tuner cards, digital audio players and LCDTVs
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Sapphire's products are based on AMD graphics processing units, and both AMD (ATI) and Intel motherboard chipset technology. The company is the largest supplier of AMD-based video cards in the world.
Sapphire was the first company to release a video card with a high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connector.
Sapphire was the first company to release a video card having clock speed of 1000 MHz (1 GHz) with the release of the Sapphire Atomic Edition HD 4890.
Manufacturing facilities
As of 2007, Sapphire has two ISO 9001 and ISO 14001-certified manufacturing facilities in Dongguan, China, which have a monthly production capacity of 1.8 million video cards. The manufacturing facility had an area of about 250,000 m² used by 16 independent production lines as of May 2005.
Manufacturing process
Sapphire buys printed circuit boards (PCB), the basic part of a graphics card, from an external contractor. The next step in the process is placement of the surface mount device (SMD) components. This is performed by a fully automated placement machine. Soldering is performed using the reflow soldering method. It then uses AMD Graphics' technology to place the memory and GPU required for the specific graphic card.