Testbed and Methods
RADEON X800 XL graphics card equipped with a Thermaltake CL-G0003 cooler was tested on the following platform:
- Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
- Intel Desktop D925XCV mainboard;
- DDR2 PC2-4300 (533MHz) SDRAM (Micron Technology, 2x512MB);
- Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
- Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
- ATI CATALYST 5.3;
- Riva Tuner 2.0 version 15.4.
For the performance comparison we used a reference RADEON X800 XL graphics card equipped with a standard cooler from ATI technologies. We decided to test CL-G003 in two modes: in passive mode without additional air cooling, and with an additional 120-mm fan working at lower rotation speed at 5V. In the latter case, the noise level doesn?t get disturbed as the fan is very quiet, and you can hardly notice it against the background of the processor cooler, hard disk drive cooler and the fans of the Levicom 550XPE-P power supply unit. We installed this additional fan so that the air flow could cool the card from behind, where the power supply connector is all the way through the CL-G0003 device.
We selected FutureMark 3DMark05 and Half-Life 2 game as our major test applications. In half-Life 2 we created a special demo record on d1_canals_12 level, which added more workload on the graphics subsystem as it was very rich in pixel shaders. For the same reason, i.e. to increase the workload on the graphics subsystem, all tests were run in 1600x1200 resolution with enabled FSAA 4x and 16x anisotropic filtering. The results were measured with the Riva Tuner utility, which can read temperatures from the thermal diode built into the contemporary GPUs.
Before we took the results from the diode in idle mode we had the loaded system stay idle for 20 minutes, so that the graphics processor temperature could stabilize. After that we started 3DMark05 benchmarks set and had each test run 3 times to minimize the measuring error. When the card rested for another 20 minutes to cool down, we launched the popular 3D shooter, Half-Life 2, and ran twice the xcanals05 demo created on d1_canals_12 level. During the test session the room temperature in the lab was 26oC.
