Radeon X800 Pro Card Roundup --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Temperature Testing

All testing was conducted in our test lab's air-conditioned environment where the still air temperature remains constant at 22 degrees Celsius. Using our thermal probes, we took temperature readings in five areas:- near the VPU core, directly behind the VPU, power transistors, forward and rear facing memory components, while running some of the more intensive tests. The results of these were compiled and plotted on the graph below and arranged in ascending order of the graphics card's recorded temperature.

HIS stole the limelight with its IceQ version of the RADEON X800 PRO, which adopted Arctic Cooling's ATI Silencer 4 cooler. With excellent all-round cooling and a direct heat exhaust unit, warm air gets expelled out of the system immediately. No other card in the shootout came close to compete with the HIS. Sapphire has a more expensive Toxic edition which uses the same solution from Arctic Cooling and this should rival the HIS Excalibur X800Pro IceQ II VIVO, but as far as the shootout is concerned HIS wins this testing phase hands down.

The rest of the cards clocked temperatures that were inline with our expectations from early testing of reference cards. GeCube and Gigabyte recorded higher temperatures than most others because they have 16 rendering pipelines operational in the VPU, while other cards were only endowed with the standard set of 12 active pipelines. Hence, the higher temperatures recorded were perfectly justifiable.

Note that among the RADEON X800 PRO cards that had 12 rendering pipelines active, PowerColor was the only card exhibiting higher temperature figures when compared with cards from ABIT, Connect3D and Sapphire.



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