PowerColor X800 GTO VIVO: PCB Design
The PowerColor X800 GTO VIVO uses the reference PCB design of the ATI RADEON X800 XL, but has a different cooling system and sports a Rage Theater chip ?the one that supports the VIVO functionality.
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You can see for yourself that there’s no difference from the RADEON X800 XL. The cards coincide to a minutest detail and quite understandably so ?there is not much sense in developing a completely new PCB design for a product that is destined for a rather short lifecycle.
Although there is a Rage Theater processor on board, the card is not equipped with an additional yellow-colored onboard header to connect to a composite video input that can be found on the front panel of some system cases. An additional power connector is missing, too, because even the 16-pipelined RADEON X800 XL can be powered up through the PCI Express x16 slot alone. Of course, the slot will power up the 12-pipelined RADEON X800 GTO which uses the same R430 GPU as well.
The cooling system is the same as was deployed on the PowerColor X800 GT, differing only in the color of the sticker. This simple all-aluminum design with an axial fan can well cope with a RADEON X800 GT or an X800 GTO, and without much noise, too. The GPU die touches the heatsink’s sole through a layer of thick dark-gray thermal paste whereas the memory chips have no contact with the heatsink whatever. It is not a big problem as GDDR3 chips working at frequencies up to 500 (1000) MHz do not heat up much, but the “heat bag?effect may occur, especially if your system case is not ventilated well.
The graphics processor is clocked at 400MHz, exactly as described in the RADEON X800 GTO specification, while the 2.0ns K4J55323QF-GC20 memory chips from Samsung are clocked at 490 (980) MHz. We shouldn’t expect overclocking wonders from this graphics card since the R430 is not a very overclocker-friendly chip. Some memory frequency growth may be achieved, but the frequency will hardly get higher than 550 (1100) MHz. Well, let’s better check it out right away.
