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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."
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?
Ryan - http://www.thecosmotron.com/
Wait, no, it's from ATI, nevermind.
The "article" is a shitty little blurb with a few pictures. Not a single performance number or any bit of useful information.
/. in a while.
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
For shame, CowboyNeal.
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*
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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?
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.
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.
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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'
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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.
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.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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.
Hobby Robotics
On Sapphire Technologies there is a little more info, but not much.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
A handy database for those shopping for a videocard.
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.
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