The Sound Of Silence

We'll forego doing power draw measurements, mainly because the setup for doing them is not yet in place, but also because this has been covered in-depth by other interested parties. However, we'll discuss thermal performance and noise, since these can be properly tackled.

Thermally, the card is cool enough to get the artist formerly known as Vanilla Ice to use it in new lyrics. Well, not really, but it's pretty damn cool, hovering around 45°C at idle and topping out at about 75°C when under load, even when placed in a warm 30°C environment. Given the fact that it's sporting a cooler that's entirely over-dimensioned given the thermal output, that's hardly unexpected.

In terms of noise, it's pleasingly silent...most of the time. And now the time has come to read why these boards are hardly what you'd call a press-edition thing, unless someone at ATI HQ really has a cruel sense of humour when it comes to journalists. So, we were at the part where it's mostly silent. Imagine then, in your folly, you decide to run something more demanding on it, like an instruction rate test, some quirky shaders, or absolutely heaven forbid, a game. It remains pleasingly quiet until the logic doing the temperature/fan speed math gets all uppity and decides it's hammer time

The cooler then unleashes a short but violent whoosh, courtesy of the blower spinning up to its top-rated speed for a showing of might, only to spin down immediately after. Do not want. It's extremely annoying, and quite an adequate torture device for those not using headphones -- press edition indeed. Now, you may be thinking that it's a small price to pay for mostly silent operation, but after you've had it shoryuken you in your aural nuts a few times, you'd quickly discover you don't like it and you'd prefer something more constant as opposed to all of these acoustic "surprises".

We're not exactly unaccustomed to noisy cooling solutions, having dealt with such superstars as the XGI Volari DUO, and indeed ATI's X1900 XTX or the 2900 XT (which we were happy to decry, too). We hope it can be fixed via a BIOS update, or via a driver update, but it hasn't happened yet. Therefore, you should have considerably less reasons to be sorry about the reference design change.

One last breath before the leap: testing particularities.