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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).

24 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.

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    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.

      --
      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.
    3. Re:But. . . by Mike+Savior · · Score: 3, Informative

      Doom 3, Unreal Tournament, CS (via wine), games that run in cedega.. there might not be a slew of games for Linux and I know I'm missing some, but there are great ports out there that the troll community just likes to ignore for their own sake.

      --
      space is pretty cool.
    4. Re:But. . . by mcpkaaos · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Is there a usable Linux driver

      As long as you plan on staying with Xorg 6.8.x, you should be fine. Anything greater and you might be one of the many, many people (myself included) who suffer hard lock-ups when X shuts down or you switch VTs while X is running. I have tried many combinations of kernels and versions of fglrx against a couple versions of Xorg (6.8.2 and modular), and only 6.8.2 was stable. YMMV, but this has been a fairly common issue for a number of folks. Although this makes it sound like Xorg is the problem, I don't believe it is. IIRC, someone over at the Gentoo forums traced it to a call made within the driver.

      I've since given up on running modular X with my ATI card and chose to mask it until my next upgrade (which will be NVidia, no doubt). It's been a month or two, so this may have been fixed (though I doubt it). If anyone has an update on that, please do tell.

      Good luck. :)

      --
      It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
    5. Re:But. . . by espinafre · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.


      Sometimes I wonder if "faulty drivers" isn't an excuse for actually sub-par hardware... How can anyone tell?
  2. Shocking metal nips. by LordOfTheNoobs · · Score: 3, Funny

    As you can see, he was truly shocked.

    / probably at his sweet new ability to render metal nips
    // i believe these figures from the article specify metal nipple rendering in the tera-nip range.
    ///totally sweet

    --
    They're there affecting their effect.
  3. Assuming... by knifeyspooney · · Score: 5, Funny

    assuming you can get hold of a similarly cooled master card

    Indeed, my MasterCard will need some cooling off time after I purchase one of these babies.

  4. 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 Briareos · · Score: 2, Informative
      I'd rather see such cooling techniques used to make silent mid-range cards with good performance

      There you go...

      It's not as if fitting a cooler to a graphics card were hard or anything.
      --

      "I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole

    2. 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)

  5. Re:No HDR/FSAA on 7950 GX2 - crap! by imboboage0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    I believe it was in reference to running both HDR and AA at the same time. I don't know if this has been resolved since last I checked, but that was the advantage to having ATI as far as I could tell.

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  6. Pathetic. by bronney · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Went and looked at the OC results and well, it's like nil. Why bother with watercooling when you can't squeeze more clocks out of it. I believe the vid fan isn't the noisest part in the box?

    1. 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.

    2. Re:Pathetic. by Superfarstucker · · Score: 2, Informative

      With proper water cooling i'm able to run @ 780/890 on these with only soft modifications. With hard voltage modifications these cards will do a lot more. (25-30% out of spec) Of course, from a value proposition it is all a waste of money, but it is fun to tinker. I don't think this is a good 'value proposition' either. Middle of the road is the best I suppose.

  7. Universities by sowth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I imaging plenty of universities use 3D acceleration in Linux for their work, among other places. Then again, they probably use one of the BSDs or Unix...

  8. Just ignore ATI by idonthack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Any time I look at buying a card, ATI gets completely ignored because Nvidia's Linux support is so much better.

    --
    Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
  9. Re:I'd never upgrade if I could. by mcpkaaos · · Score: 2, Funny

    How long did it take you to be okay with overlapping windows? Sorry to bring up a sore subject.

    --
    It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
  10. Not liquid cooling, but... by Rob+Simpson · · Score: 4, Informative
    Well, there are a bunch of low to mid-range cards from ASUS and Gigabyte which use big heatsinks and heatpipes for passive cooling, the fastest of which (that I am aware of, anyway) is the Asus EN7800GT Top Silent. Unlike the water-cooled card, these are actually silent, instead of just having a much quieter fan, though I suppose most people will be happy as long as their card doesn't sound like a jet engine.


    Here are links to the company websites, look for "Silent-Pipe" or "Silent" in the name...
    http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/VGA/Products_Lis t.aspx?VenderType=ATi&BUSType=PCI-E&BUSSpeed=16
    http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/VGA/Products_Lis t.aspx?VenderType=NVIDIA&BUSType=PCI-E&BUSSpeed=16
    http://usa.asus.com/products2.aspx?l1=2&l2=8
    http://usa.asus.com/products2.aspx?l1=2&l2=6

  11. Energy consumption by tsa · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I always wonder what the energy consumption for water cooling is compared to air cooling. Does anyone know anything about that?

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  12. Re:Extra performace not important anymore... by Shook18 · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.silentpcreview.com/ A few thousand people there seem to think noise is more important than performance.

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    The Tech Terminal
  13. The Playstation 3's price is outrageous... by vijayiyer · · Score: 4, Funny

    So I'll get a video card instead.

  14. It's a fairly trivial difference by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Water cooling pumps don't need a lot of wattage to run, neither do air cooling fans. In general water cooling probably uses slightly more power since usually the water cooling radiator is air cooled, so you've fans and a pump. However it's just not a significant amount of power next to the other draws in the system.

    Rememeber all the power is needed for is moving things around, either air or water. There's not a compressor or anything.

  15. A difference of degree by DragonHawk · · Score: 2, Funny
    "Any time I look at buying a card, ATI gets completely ignored because Nvidia's Linux support is so much better."

    s/so much better/sucks less/
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