Connect 3D and Sapphire Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX

Overclocking, Power, Heat & Noise

As usual, we wanted to see how well these cards overclocked over the factory speeds, particularly with the water cooled Blizzard X1900 XTX. We've done enough overclocking in the past to know that no matter how a particular card may look, there's no guarantee that it will achieve a high overclock, so we weren't sure what to expect with this card.

As with our last X1900 article, our usual ATI overclocking tool (Powerstrip) didn't work so we used ATITool to get our overclocks. As we explained before, we found that the clock speeds indicated by ATITool weren't quite accurate, with performance being slightly lower than the numbers represent. We were still able get an idea of how well these cards overclock, and these are the clock speeds we achieved.

Overclocking Speeds
Graphics Card	Core (in MHz)	Memory (MHz)
Sapphire Blizzard X1900 XTX	698	823
Connect 3D X1900 XTX	685	810WS

* Keep in mind that the clock speeds shown are actually a little higher than the real clock speeds.

Power





It makes sense that the Blizzard X1900 XTX setup would have a higher power draw than the Connect3D, or any of the standard X1900s around, because the water block requires an extra power connection to run the pump, especially considering the results of our heat tests which follow. This is something that will probably dissuade those who are concerned with the power load on their system from considering this card.

Heat

We were also able to get an idea of how much heat these two cards generated with ATITool.



The Connect3D X1900 XTX quickly came up to temperature and ran without any problems under stress testing, but we found that the Blizzard X1900 XTX acted a little differently. The Blizzard would come up to peak temperature much more slowly than the Connect3D, no doubt due to the water cooling system, but under testing with this card using ATITool there was some slight trouble keeping it stable for long periods of stress. Water has a much higher thermal capacity than air, allowing the coolant to absorb quite a bit of heat; however, the radiator doesn't appear sufficient to keep the card at a lower temperature under extended testing, so eventually it reaches higher temperatures than you might expect. We aren't sure if this is the case for all Blizzard X1900 XTXs, but we did find that it ran extended stress tests with Splinter Cell Chaos Theory without any trouble, so we concluded that there most likely wouldn't be any issues with this card and long periods of actual gaming (as opposed to synthetic benchmark stressing).

Noise



One of the purported benefits of the Blizzard water cooled X1900 XTX is that it will supposedly generate significantly less noise than an air cooled solution. We measured the sound levels of both cards and found that this is in fact the case. While the Blizzard isn't exactly "silent" like Sapphire suggests, we are impressed by how quiet the card is during operation, especially considering how noisy X1900 cards tend to be.