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Liquid Cooled X1900 XTX Card Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-barrel-of-oil-so-much-more-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "TrustedReview's Andrew Miller has posted a review of the new liquid cooled Radeon X1900 XTX card. There have been a few reviews floating around based on engineering samples of this product, but it sounds like the actual card turned out to be quite a sight to behold." From the review: "If you are seriously considering buying an X1900 XTX, then it is well worth paying the extra money for this card as the noise reduction is dramatic. The extra performance is just an added bonus. However, the 7950 GX2 is simultaneously faster and quieter for the same money. The X1900 XTX on the other hand has the option of HDR and FSAA as well as the possibility of running in Crossfire (assuming you can get hold of a similarly cooled master card).

6 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. But. . . by kimvette · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is there a usable Linux driver to accompany that card when it's released? Yeah I know I know, the core gaming market is Windows, but some Linux users DO want fast video cards.

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    1. Re:But. . . by mattmacf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't mean to sound trollish (ok, maybe just a bit), but given ATI's track record, I doubt there's a reliable Windows driver for this card. And in all seriousness, what would you need to run in Linux that requires such a high end video card. Personally, I think it's just a bit overkill for Tux Racer.

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      I only mod funny =D
    2. Re:But. . . by SlashdotOgre · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd be happy if ATI released an Xorg 7.1 compatible driver; I've had to mask Xorg 7.1 in Gentoo since I run Xgl and need the proprietary driver. To be fair, ATI tends to be relatively quick in supporting their latest cards with their Linux drivers. For example when I got my Dell D610 with the mobile X300 in Feb. 2005 (the D610 was one of the first machines with the new PCIe vid cards on a laptop), there was a compatible binary driver within a month. Unfortunately, the driver had a bug and hung on systems with >732MB of RAM, and this bug took 3 months to be fixed -- but initial support was quite fast for the card. I hope with the increase in popularity of Xgl, and with Xorg breaking the ABI for both nVidia & ATI's proprietary drivers, we may see more of an effort fo Linux support by the vid card makers.

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      Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
  2. Mainstream liquid cooling. by A+Nun+Must+Cow+Herd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd rather see such cooling techniques used to make silent mid-range cards with good performance, rather than having it only available with hideously expensive high end cards.

    1. Re:Mainstream liquid cooling. by Aceticon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      From a mainstream point of view it would be even beter if there were some standardized cooling solutions for the whole PC (thus CPU, GFX and possibly HDs and power source) - maybe with things like standard CPU cooling blocks that can actually be mounted the same way as CPU fans, graphics cards with pre-assembled watercooling blocks (not a whole watercooling solution), water cooled power sources, pre-assembled tubing connections with leak-proof connectors at their endings, etc ...

      As it is at the moment, each manufacturer has their own solutions, each with different sized (and hard to find) tubing; parts compatibility consists of forcing the tubing to fit into oversized connectors or looking up in specialized stores for upsizing/downsizing connectors; fiting a cooling block to a CPU mount or a graphics card usually requires (partial) disassembling of the mountings/existing-cooling on motherboard/graphics card; tubing just comes as one long tube that you have to cut into pieces and (sometimes forcibly) fit into the connectors (hardly foolproof); it's hard to find discrete components outside specialized stores (although full solutions are not that hard to find); fail-prone components such as pumps are usually buil-in on some part or other of the solution and often cannot easilly be replaced without getting a whole new assembly.

      Having installed watercooling on my PC some years ago and gone through the paces of extending it to cover the GFX, extending the length of the connections to the dissipation block (by eventually finding a tubbing size which could be forced to fit) and replacing the pump with an external pump, i came to the conclusion that watercooling is still far from mainstream.
      (on the upside, if i ever get a real aquarius i now know all about which pumps are best)

  3. Re:Pathetic. by Frogbert · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Thats the point, the video card fan shouldn't be the noisiest fan in a system, unfortunately a X1900XTX fan is.