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Water-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX Benchmarks 49

Posted by timothy from the overcompensate-much? dept.
sand writes "Sapphire has just released their liquid-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX card, the Toxic X1950 XTX. Located on top of the GPU is a water block from Thermaltake that is connected to an separate cooling unit which houses a 12V pump, radiator, and fan. The card is also overclocked to 695MHz for added performance. Firingsquad has a complete review of the board, including benchmarks against NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad SLI card."
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Water-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX Benchmarks More

Water-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX Benchmarks

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  • Skip the BS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Billy the Impaler ( 886238 ) on Friday October 13, 2006 @01:08AM (#16419269)
    Read the print article: http://firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_s ection=Hardware&fs_article_id=2018 [firingsquad.com]

  • Overclocking is good? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by From A Far Away Land ( 930780 ) on Friday October 13, 2006 @01:16AM (#16419315) Homepage Journal
    " The card is also overclocked to 695MHz for added performance."

    I remember when chip stability was a feature of production equipment. I suppose some people like to use more power and get more from their chip, but when the company does it for you, is it really "over" clocked? I presume it doesn't invalidate the warranty. If it doesn't, then its simply a marketing buzzword gimick, giving you underpowered chips, and eeking out more than they are best suited for.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Billy the Impaler ( 886238 )
      I remember when chip stability was a feature of production equipment.

      This isn't for production work. 99% of the buyers for this product will use it in high-end gaming systems and as such it is ostensibly for gaming. ATi and nVidia both sell production-level video adapters that are designed for accuracy and stability more than absolute speed. This card is built for speed, pure and simple. I think it's an important distinction to make.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Explodo ( 743412 )
      When ATI designs the chips(note that the manufacturer is not ATI, but Sapphire), it designs them to a reference specification that will run with stability under a variety of real-world situations(at least that's what I hope they do). The manufacturer then slaps on a more effective cooler and can overclock the chipset to get more performance.
    • That's what the water cooling is for. Regular clocking probably does OK with air cooling.

      Again, the water cooling could just be engineering overkill for market hype purposes.

      Sometimes overclocking can be achieved by screening regular chips, and overclocked chips are justscreened to be able to perform higher than specced. Of course, with non critical parts they just let the consumer do the sceening.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NotBorg ( 829820 ) *

      Personally I think Darren E. Polkowski of Toms Hardware is right:

      "We all want different things when it comes to advancements, but first and foremost we need better power management. The bottom line is simple: graphics makers must take a step back from feature brainstorming until the power issue is resolved."

      see here [tomshardware.com] in the concussion section.

  • Sigh (Score:2, Troll)

    by Kangburra ( 911213 )
    Their full press release is a word [sapphiretech.com] document.

    While I know Openoffice can open it, can't these people use something more friendly?
    • More friendly to who? like you said, Openoffice opens it just fine. How well do you think a basic install of work would handle an odf file? Now, considering that Word is the most common office software by far it makes perfect sense to me to release it as a .doc
      • I think what the parent is getting at is that it's not necessary to release this as a document for a WYSIWYG text editor. It could just as easily be a 4 kiB text file. It could even be a .pdf which is far easier to view on the web in comparison to a MS Word document.
        • Yep, I am viewing a web site, show me an HTML page please. If they wrote the press release in word it has a "save as HTML" option, use it.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Psiven ( 302490 )
        It's comments like these that make slashdot need a +1 Ironic modifier, or a +1 In Your Face.
      • How about Word users learning to save documents as .RTF? All the formatting, all the crunchy font goodness, even cutesy ASCII art if they want it.

        Smaller download size, doesn't give out your history, revisions and personal information to everyone on the planet, and won't spread macro viruses.

        And every word processing program written in the last 10 years will open it without any problems or loss of content. All it takes is selecting "Save as" from the file menu when you're ready to post it.

        Friends don'

  • If you're an ATI enthusiast who craves the most performance, it doesn't get any better than Sapphire's TOXIC X1950 XTX at this point. Quite simply, it's the coolest-running Radeon X1950 XTX board on the market right now, and with the addition of A.P.E., it's also the fastest X1950 XTX.

    .....

    With an MSRP of $539, Sapphire's TOXIC X1950 XTX is by no means cheap. With street prices on X1950 XTX boards often selling for $450 or less, you could buy your own Radeon X1950 XTX board and mount an aftermarket cool

  • The internet needs more video card reviews!

    Go Slashdot go!
  • How can you review a 19xx-series ATI card and not include a Folding@home benchmark?
  • Last Hurrah for ATI engineers. Once we buy them we are firing all of them .

    We just want the chipset business. We dont need GPUs . We will be putting Graphics cores in our next chip with heterogenous cores

      Huaaaahahaha .

    Evil AMDer !!!!

  • Great but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tonigonenstein ( 912347 ) on Friday October 13, 2006 @02:40AM (#16419763)
    ...does it come with a cooler for my wallet ?

  • bah (Score:3, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Friday October 13, 2006 @02:45AM (#16419797) Homepage
    Sapphire has just released their liquid-cooled Radeon X1950 XTX card, the Toxic X1950 XTX.

    Bah, that's nothing. You should see my liquid-cooled Dell laptop [cpsc.gov].
  • Toxic X1950 XTX.

    To calculate the rough performance of any given 3d card, take the number of "X"s in the name and multiply by the price. Should give a fairly accurate 3dmark score.

    • What are they using for a cooling liquid, ethylene glycol [wikipedia.org] perhaps?

      Oh, I get it, it's hyperbole. So now if I buy a product that says "toxic" on the box, there's no way of knowing whether it is or isn't, and whether I can leave it around young kids without them getting too curious and going to the hospital. Ingenious! What will they think of next?

  • I confess. I looked at the pictures. I had dirty thoughts. I looked long enough to conclude. Then, I relativated and went immediately back to work. I will penance myself.

  • Too little, too late (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr. Samuel ( 950418 ) on Friday October 13, 2006 @05:34AM (#16420729)
    Next month, nVidia will release the 7777 Lucky Seven Fever GTX-EXR-Type S-Twin Turbo. It can transform into a fighter jet, power zord, or GPU. I might be able to afford the card itself, but I'm going to ask my parents to co-sign a loan for me so I can afford a new PSU to power it. I'll post my 3dMark score ASAP!
    • Will it also provide me extra hours to play, counseling for my marriage, stimulent drugs for keeping me awake at work, liposuction for my lack of exercise, and a massage for my sore ass from marathon gaming sessions?
  • I fail to see the usefullness of the watercooling. I could understand if the radiator was fanless, but it's not. Why wouldn't they just attach the heatsync to the card, and drop the whole watercooling thing. It's a lot less complicated, with less to break or leak. When you look at the design, they could have anther card slot dedicated to a heatsync (like the NVidia 7900GTX), and then they wouldn't have to sacrifice heatsync room for the water resivoir and pump. If they put the heat sync on the card, they co

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by skrew ( 111096 )
      And the real question: Will it have Linux drivers?
    • A benifit of this design is that you can relocate the "pump" card so that you may be able to gain back one of those PCI slots that the dual slot cards typically take over. Of course you just wind up losing a different slot.
  • I have never used a water cooling system. Has anyone seen what happens when one malfunctions inside your case?
    • A little off topic, but I read an article somewhere about creating the ultimate silent PC. It included making the case completely air and water tight, removal of all fans and active cooling, and filling up the case with a non conductive oil (I think canola oil) for a heat transfer medium.
  • FTFA:

    The card's liquid cooler is only responsible for cooling the GPU. That's it.

    Everywhere else Sapphire's TOXIC board is basically identical to every over Radeon X1950 XTX on the market. Sapphire has made no design changes to ATI's reference board design, or the PCB itself.

    So, it's a stock card that has liquid cooling. The only reason this is noteworth, aside from the geek factor, is that the cooling allows for moderate overclocking (695 vs 650 MHz), resulting in moderate performance gains.

  • The 7950GX2 is SLI on a card. It can only be made quad-SLI if you run TWO nVidia 7950GX2 cards, which was not done in this situation.
  • I fail to see why anyone would spend an extra $200, or 60% more than a regular x1900xtx card, to buy this card that averages less than 5% performance gain at best and in most cases less than 4%. Additionally, in many cases this card was outperformed by the 7950GX2 card that is only $40 more with no watercooling.

    There is no way any mere mortal, gamer or otherwise, will be able to tell the difference between 79fps with the stock x1900xtx card, and 83fps with the fancy schmancy overclocked card. At some po
  • ...when all we had to worry about were memory leaks?

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