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A
Closer Look:::...
Having
been historically adorned with relatively petite coolers,
particularly in comparison to NVIDIA's cards, the X850XT
looks especially dominated by the large fan and fin unit.
The now trademark red PCB looks class, but in light of the
dust it's likely to collect on its inner surfaces I thing
the clear shroud would have benefited from a little tint
of colour to help disguise the fact.
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Card
- Front View
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On
the rear of the card we can see that a steel "L" plate serves to reinforce the mounting of the front cooler
while also helping draw some heat away from the memory chips
and radiating it over the larger surface area. A few fins
on this plate would have gone a long way to keeping the
memory chips cooler and would probably have cost very little
to implement.
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Card
- Rear View
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Now
for the shocker, though probably not quite as much of a
shocker as it was when it was first introduced, the X800XT
sports a dual-slot cooling solution. I hope that if this
becomes de rigueur we see motherboard manufacturers shuffle
their PCI slots around so we don't constantly have one sat
idle. Or at least make more effective use of the PCB that
slot currently occupies.
On
the card edge are a VGA, DVI and general video output.
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Card
- End View
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There
must surely have been some discussion over which way the air
should flow through the cooler. For maximum cooling air would
be drawn in from outside and vented into the case, though
to their credit ATi have chosen not to disrupt the normal
flow of air through your case and draw air in from the rear,
venting it to the outside.
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Card
- Cooler
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The
fan is large and, when the system first begins POSTing it's
also noisy, and I mean VERY noisy. The good news
is that other than for that brief few seconds during POSTing,
I've yet to hear the fan operate anything like this level
of noise, even after a heavy session while overclocked.
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Card
- Cooler
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If
I have one concern over the design, it's that we seem to
be slowly, silently moving towards the monstrosity that
was the GeForceFX 5700 Ultra. Quite how we get past the
problem of noisy fans is a tough one, partly because it's
the noise created by the fan blades cutting through the
air that's the major contributor, not the fan motor. We
may see things like ultrasonic motors make it onto cooling
units but how tackle blade noise is another matter entirely.
Bigger fans is the obvious answer, but until we move the
fan off the card this isn't likely to happen. Liquid cooling
seems like the sensible option but isn't really a stand-alone
answer for cooling single components.
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Beauty
and The Beast?
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