|
Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
|
|
Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
|
Page 8 of 13
In spite of AMD's (whose traditional colour is a peaceful green one) acquisition of ATi earlier on (this is the first series of graphics cards branded as AMD), the card retained ATi's “fiery” spirit. The blood-red PCB joint with semitransparent plastic looks truly impressive. The motive of fire is supposed to represent this card's speed, and makes it really attractive, but the same motive can be associated with the heat it produces. The fan is a “blower”-type one, and makes some serious noise when rotating at full speed.
The overall temperatures are high, but nothing else could be expected anyway. However, we believe that most manufacturers will design their own cooling solutions. The cooler base is made of copper, and makes the card quite heavy (but still lighter than the 8800GTX). It goes without saying that it occupies an extra slot as well. Situated on top of the card are a couple of CrossFire tabs, although the card also supports native CrossFire, as previously seen on X1950PRO and X1650XT models.
The GDDR3 memory is signed by Hynix and has a response time of 1.0 ns. It's clocked at only 1650 MHz, which suggested us that it is highly overclockable, at least up to 2 GHz. However, while overclocking, we couldn't pass the barrier of 835 MHz for the core and 1940 MHz for the memory, which is strange, since the memory was designed to work at a value of 2 GHz. Maybe it's the voltage, but we can’t confirm it just yet. Anyway, the 512-bit bus is wide more than enough, so that those 60-70 MHz wouldn't make much of a difference.
As far as the power consumption is concerned, the card uses up to 230W at full load, so no wonder why it requires additional 6-pin and 8-pin connectors. Yes, both of them. The card was functioning even with only two 6-pins, but in that case the OC was disabled in the ATi OverDrive. All in all, you will definitely need a PSU adequately strong to fully “feed” this card with power. Also worth mentioning is that the card contains an ATi Rage Theatre 200 chip as well.
|
Reviews 
