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."

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.

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.

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.

7900GTX watercooled retail card.

[Anonymous Coward]

The EVGA GeForce 7900GTX CO 512MB Black Pearl [webhallen.com] is water-cooled, but not self-contained.

A little more info

[Daath]

On Sapphire Technologies [sapphiretech.com] there is a little more info, but not much.

Most obvious question:

[WillerZ]

What keeps the graphics RAM chips cool? Usually air is blown down onto the processor whence it goes across the RAM chip coolers.

In the photos, the RAM chips still have cooling fins, and they're still aligned radially around the core; however, since there is no airflow there they're surely going to overheat...

Budget alternatives?-Videocard DB.

[Anonymous Coward]

A handy database [gpureview.com] for those shopping for a videocard.

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.