GeCube's Radeon X850 XT Uniwise

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I better explain what Uniwise is. GeCube's Jeff Yu, the engineer behind the Uniwise cooler, explained the cooler to me at CeBIT, recently. The theory behind it is simple: use a highly efficient heatpipe to move GPU heat to a copper heatsink, before exchanging the heat into the case using a large but quiet fan, that moves a good volume of air.

Comparing it to the dual-slot X850 XT PE cooler - and let me just point out that the single-slot Uniwise cooler is more than happy cooling that SKU, too - you don't have to suffer dual-slot cooling and the fan is quieter to boot. Using a large retention plate on the rear of the card, which also acts as a memory cooler, he can attain higher cooler pressure on the GPU. Combine that higher pressure with the considered heatpipe design and you have a single-slot cooler with a quiet fan that'll cool X850 XT and X850 XT PE without issue.

If you had a really close look at GeCube's demo systems at CeBIT, you'll have noticed the X850 XT Uniwise was actually an XT PE, running XT PE clocks. Enclosed in the plastic boxes they presented the systems in, with barely any ventilation, you could physically feel the heat being vented out of the box. Despite the high heat, the cooler kept the demo running on the system without a hitch, at the aforementioned XT PE clocks.

Click for a larger version

Click for a larger version
You can see the cooler, with its array of horizontal (as you look at it in that photograph) fins flanked by the large fan on the left. The heatpipe runs from the part of the cooler that's above the GPU, up and right to along the edge of the cooler at the top, where the main expanse of copper is.

You can see the PCI Express power connector, and audio connector for the on-board Theater 200 ASIC, on the top right of the board, in the first photograph. Looking at the second photograph of the rear of the board, you can see the larger than normal retention bracket for the cooler, which also doubles as a cooler for the memory chips on the rear of the board. You can also see the Theater 200 IC. While I've neglected to show you the DRAM devices, they're Samsung's 600MHz GDDR3 devices.

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Looking a bit closer, you can see the heatpipe and its interface using thermal paste, to the main copper structure. That's the key to the Uniwise working as a cooler for X850 XT and X850 XT PE, pulling the heat away from the core quickly.

Click for a larger version
Looking at the board's profile, from the top edge, you can see the thermal pads that interface the cooler and the back plate to the GPU and the memory devices. It seems like a really simple fix for high-clocked R480's thermal issues, but the heatpipe design of the Uniwise cooler really seems to work. More on its performance later.

Finally, the board sports a pair of DVI ports for connecting digital displays. Unlike NVIDIA boards that share the same feature, the port on the right, as you look at this picture, drives the primary display.

[Pages]
   Last Page
   [1]· Introduction
   [2]· GeCube's Radeon X850 XT Uniwise
   [3]· Presentation
   [4]· System Setup and Notes
   [5]· 3D Performance
   [6]· The cooler's performance
   [7]· Thoughts
   Next Page



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