Liquid Cooled X1900 XTX Card Reviewed

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).

Pathetic.

[bronney]

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?

Universities

[sowth]

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...

Just ignore ATI

[idonthack]

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

Re:But. . .

[mcpkaaos]

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. :)

Energy consumption

[tsa]

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

Re:But. . .

[espinafre]

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?