Self Contained Water Cooled Radeon X1900, Retail

Spinnerbait writes "Graphics cards are all the rage in the Enthusiast Computing community, where overclocking standard off-the-shelf components is commonplace. Recently innovative cooling solutions have been brought to Graphics cards in an effort to tame the thermals of their power hungry GPUs. It looks like some of the major vendors have taken it up a notch in this area, with this ATI-based Sapphire Graphics card that employs a self-contained water cooling system. Not only does the card have potential for serious overclocking but it should do so relatively quietly as well."

Comments

More Power!

[cosmotron]

I wonder how much power this uses if you have your own water cooling for everything else, then a seperate system just for your video card?

But does it run...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, no, it's from ATI, nevermind.

What a shitty submission.

[Spazntwich]

The "article" is a shitty little blurb with a few pictures. Not a single performance number or any bit of useful information.

My first instinct? Check the link for the submitter's webpage. Oh, what a coincidence.

Look, I'm not one to normally complain about poor stories and worthless submissions, but this one takes the cake. It's the most obvious grab for clicks and advertisement revenue that's been posted on /. in a while.

For shame, CowboyNeal.

Re:What a shitty submission.

[Spazntwich]

I wouldn't complain if he waited until they ran benchmarks, tried overclocking it, or had some actual news to report.

You know, the kinds of details that usually make it into a news article. This is "Hey, look. It's a videocard with a waterblock on it. Betcha never seen one of them before!" and the fact that it's shameless self-promotion only makes it worse.

nice teaser

[gEvil (beta)]

Since the article is really only a teaser, there isn't much to be said about it. However, assuming this thing works well, it's a nice direction to see the high-end GPU market head towards. Now if only I could afford one...

Thats all great but...

[Monkeys!!!]

Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.

I'm not trolling, I'm just bitter that everyone is focused on pushing the graphical boundaries of games and leaving the game play for later. I remember a time when it was about hours of game play not frames per second.

*goes off to play Deus Ex*

Re:Thats all great but...

[cgenman]

Overclock all you want and you are still playing the same game as everyone else.

Rendering power is overrated when talking about game graphics. If you look at World of Warcraft, the game looks incredible. But it looks incredible on lower-end systems too... the art direction is just spot on across the board. Half-Life 2 uses some neat graphical tricks, but in general the game looks amazing because the artists had a clear vision of what they were creating and ensured that every pixel that went on the screen supports that. Look at the detail in the tree leaves... they're not super high-poly, they're just beautiful.

If your graphics card is good enough to run all of today's games, your graphics card is good enough. There really is no reason to spend 300 dollars every two years when spending 80 every two would be sufficient. If you want better looking games, look to lead artists, not to GPU engineers.

I'll Pass...

[evilviper]

I really don't want graphics cards with better cooling systems. I want them to RUN COOLER in the first place. Water-cooling a device just allows you to push the problem back a little further, before it really starts causing problems. Pretty soon you'll have to upgrade your power supply and home airconditioner to use a shinny new GPU.

Re:I'll Pass...

[iamplupp]

I agree. And all it takes is lowering the frequency by maybe 20% and you will be able to run it on much lower voltage and thus less power. And who needs that extra 20% anyway, really?

External PCI-X connector

[Twillerror]

I think it is about time to start thinking about the GPU as a device, like a cd-rom or harrdrive instead of a card.

They already require an external power supply in some cases, and with SLI are using a special type of connector.

I'd like to see a GPU that comes in the form of a 5.25 bay expansion, with a pci-x card that connects it via a cable to the mobo.

Then I think the industry could come up with a standard cable for all cards. Or not, given that nvidia or whoever could come up with just about anything. I could see a card that interfaces through the memory slots ( if your motherboard had enough realastate). A GPU directly connected to Hypertransport anyone?

Re:External PCI-X connector

[thebes]

As cool as that would be, the frequencies, data rates and low latencies required for a video card would cause the cable to be prohibitively expensive in order for the error/corruption rate to be comparable to a plug in card.

Water?

[nurb432]

It could be someting other then water, like antifreeze.. Woudl be able to use a peltier block and run it even colder then you can with water.

Or even sodium. So what if it breaks and the user dies ;)

Re:Water?

[Ginger Unicorn]

antifreeze conducts heat worse that water does. its possible the extra chill would be wasted by the fact less heat was being absorbed from the chip.

Why water?

[bogaboga]

I have always wondered:

Does it have to be water to cool these GPUs? Is it water because of its relative hight Specific Heat Capacity, or because it's cheap and readily available?

I can see slashdotters increasing the capacity of the "tank" that stores water on these GPUs to make sure the GPU stays cool.

Too embarassing

[Expert Determination]

Remember when that company introduced cryogenically cooled PCs? I got one at work. It was amazing - it ran at 1GHz and I had the fastest machine in the building. But a few months later it was no longer the fastest in the building but it was definitely the dumbest machine in the building - especially with the 5 minute wait for it to cool down before booting. I won't make the same mistake with water cooled graphics cards.

Self contained and silent?

[the real darkskye]

Is it actually self-contained if you have to refill it?
Is it actually silent if it still has a fan?

I think what TF[A|S] actually ment was 'pre-fitted water-cooled ATI'

Thank GOD

[zerocool^]

The last publicity pictures I saw of this card had a couple of "Models" showing it off. The blonde one looked like they had picked her up off of W124th and Lennox at about 4AM.

Shudder.

Silence or?

[Bender Unit 22]

When I looked at the pictures, my first thought was that it would not be more silent, since it still would have to move the same heat, while it might be good for overclocking. But I guess that there is a possibility of it running quietly since there are a bigger surface area for the air to move the heat than on a normal GPU cooling fan and heatsink.

I made my own PC watercooled about 1½ year ago with the purpose to make it more silent. My idea was to cool the CPU and GPU using both passive and active cooling.
I got a radiator from Innovatek.de for passive cooling inside and a small deep one for the inside for active cooling with a Papst fan.
Then I got a microcontroller that can run on its own, measure the water temperature and control fans, as well a a emergency shutdown if the water gets too hot or the pump fails.
The end result were fantastic, the PC runs almost silent when doing anything than playing games(which I don't do much anymore) but when playing games it still have the power. It manages to run mostly with passive cooling when not playing games. It is so silent that you have to look at the power LED to make sure that you have turned the PC on. When I do play games and the water starts heating up, the microcontroller starts the watercooling fan and adjusts the speed to keep the temperature down.
On mistake that I did make was that I went into it with my usual approach of reading tons of reviews on the internet to find the best cooling CPU/GPU heads and generally getting parts from different vendors that I determined would make the best solution. Exept from the internal radiator that was deeper than any other I could find, I can now see that it didn't matter which parts I used when I was not going to do overclocking.
It is better to stick with parts from one vendor so you don't have problems getting them to fit or work together. Like different sizes of tubes etc. Also the microcontroller from one vendor could not monitor the pump for another.

Where's the bling?

[Glacial Wanderer]

This card looks very boring. My quad fan card with state of the art stealth cooling fins and racing stripes looks way better. If they added some gold and diamond dust to the water to increases this cards bling I would consider buying it.

A little more info

[Daath]

On Sapphire Technologies there is a little more info, but not much.

Budget alternatives?-Videocard DB.

[Anonymous Coward]

A handy database for those shopping for a videocard.

Seems an odd design?

[SmallFurryCreature]

I always thought the problem with cooling a PC was in getting the heat OUT of the PC case. Air can be a good cooler but the problem is that it is so hard to direct the cold air in and the hot air out. Escpecially in a PC case wich is usually cramped and filled with great big walls wich block the airflow.

CUE watercooling wich takes the heat via the water outside of the case where you can have a slow unobstructed fan get rid of the heat.

Almost every design I seen always gets the hot water out of the case to be cooled down by large unobstructed fans.

Yet this setup seems to pump the water from the hot graphics card to a spare PCI slot in your PC where the fan will be blowing the heat away right inside your computer.

If you unlucky right back onto your gpu.

To be efficient the cooler would have to be outside your case, with the water cables coming out of the back of the gpu and the cooler not having a PCI mounting but something that is easily attached to your case.

It is not the first time I seen this mistake, people put the nicest fans inside their case but never spend any time considering that all that does is blow the hot air around if you do not somehow setup a flow to carry it out. Oh and another to get cool air back in.

Re:Seems an odd design?

[Theobon]

That is how this works. It also has the advantage that it doesn't have the radiator outside the case. The radiator sits in a spare pci slot cooling down the water and blowing the hot air right out the case. The biggest problem I have had with cooling video cards is that cases were not designed to move air through the video card and thus the fan just blows air into either the powersupply or another card and then sucking it in agian. It creates hots spots in the case to the point that I can have a 20C temperature gradiant in the case. This fixes that by moving the heat directly outside the case. I don't know where it is getting the fresh air from though. My guess is it is from inside the case which is dissapointing as that will be hotter than outside air but it will still be better than my current settup.
This isn't designed to replace full water cooling rigs which would be better but it does bring water cooling benifits to those that don't feel safe building there own.

Re:A very ugly worst-case scenario...

[moro_666]

you obviously have never touched the wires of the 'safe 12v' car electricity system when you're starting the engine, go try it out, i promise it will be fun. probably not lethal, but fun enough.

  but you're right about the ovens and cars, if they are built the right way, it won't really be dangerous to you, but then again, you don't beat the battery connections in the car or the wiring of the oven when you miss a frag do you ?

  the electric cow fences run at a moderatly low voltage, but the current strenth in it so large that if you touch it with bare hand, you'll remember it for the rest of your life (i remember it pretty well :s). if currents inside the computer continue the rise, we have to find methods to make the connections safer.

  i on the other hand am looking around for machines with mobile cpu's or even built ontop of the via or transmeta cpu's, because the eletricity bills are starting to get really large if you have a lot of boxes running and an alternative must be found. sure the via cpu can't do what amd or intel does, but 3 boxes of via will do better on my threaded stuff than 1 p4 box, and will consume less energy at the same time. for a quite and economical multiprocess server machine , a 4 way via or transmeta box would be much much better than a stupid p4 box which takes more energy and does less.

  ofcourse gamers will continue on the gigahertz race unless somebody totally redefines the 3d engines in the way that it can be run on many many economical cpu's instead of one that blows your fuses.