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GeCube's Radeon X850 XT Uniwise
[Abstract]
ThoughtsAdvertismentSo while I wait for the hardware I described on the first page of this article, GeCube's X850 XT will do nicely. For the performance, it's hard to argue with the ?70 asking...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
The cooler's performanceAdvertisment
I'm a big fan of the Uniwise cooler. It appears, on the surface, to do what ATI ought to have done with the X850 XT Platinum Edition reference design. So I decided to do some empirical testing to try and find any weaknesses, rather than just say "it's really quiet, will cool the card to X850 XT PE speeds without any issue whatsover" and leave it at that. After using the board in my PC for a few days, I'd found what I think is the only downside to the cooler with a GPU as hot as X850 XT or X850 XT PE. Here's a graph to explain what I mean.
The framerate series shows me having a quick run around in Half-Life 2, after setting the resolution and AA/AF settings in the menu. You can see the fan speed step up to 100% via two intermediate settings, as the game is loaded and GPU temperature starts to rise. It's supposedly temperature controlled, yet hits 100% speed pretty quickly, with barely a degree or two of temperate increase.
The only bad thing about the cooler is the fan's noise. It's the same fan as used in most other recent high-end Radeon designs, and at the default 54% of full speed, it's barely audible. As it steps up towards 100%, via ~60% and ~75%, the pitch changes and audible noise become noticable and much louder. While playing a game, as I was doing, that's not too bad since you don't notice it. However, note what the fan does after I've stopped playing the game. The temperature of the core is taking an age to drop back to the temperature it was before I started playing and the fan is stuck on the ~75% duty cycle, at which it's pretty noisy. And it just sits there for hours if you let it.
The fan is fully controllable with Rivatuner, the tool I used to record the metrics, and it's pretty essential to use with the GeCube. The issue lies mainly with the heatpipe and large copper cooler retaining heat longer, seemingly, than other Radeon variants that use the same fan. It keeps the duty cycle of the fan up higher than it would be during the same time period, on a similar non-heatpipe/large copper cooler Radeon.
Flawless if you use Rivatuner, though. Download it at Guru3D, at once, if you own any recent GeForce or Radeon. It's the cooler that should have been, on the X850 XT Platinum Edition. It affords you more options due to the form factor, is quieter than that particular cooler at the same duty cycles (they're matched in the BIOS) and handles the heat without a sniffle or moan.
Overclocking wise, 555MHz core frequency and 1240MHz (620MHz base clock) memory frequency were obtainable with perfect stability, looping any test for multiple hours, without any problems, showing the cooler even has headroom and confirming that the board has GC16 DRAMs. As it's a review sample, though, the usual caveats apply.
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Power Color Radeon X850 XT & X800 XL Review (2005-03-30)