X-bit labs

Asus EAH2600PRO/HDTI/256M Graphics Card Review (page 4)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 10/03/2007 | 02:26 PM ]

Noise and Overclocking

The cooler of the EAH2600PRO promised a low noise level and we checked this out. We performed the measurement with a digital sound-level meter Velleman DVM1326 using A-curve weighing.

At the time of our tests the level of ambient noise in our lab was 36dBA and the level of noise at a distance of 1 meter from a working testbed with a passively cooled graphics card inside was 43dBA. We got the following results:

The cooler is indeed quiet and is not audible against the noise from the working PC. It copes easily with the RV630 chip that is clocked at a lower frequency than on the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, so there is no need for speed adjustment. The fan is always rotating at a constant speed.

Our attempt to overclock our ASUS EAH2600PRO was not much of a success. None of our overclocking utilities could identify the GPU properly while the standard options of the Catalyst driver could not increase the GPU frequency above 660MHz. The GPU was stable at 660MHz, though. The memory showed zero overclockability. As soon as we increased its frequency, the graphics card would show visual artifacts and malfunction. So, the final result was 660MHz GPU and 500 (1000) MHz memory. We did not test the EAH2600PRO at the overclocked frequency because it is the memory subsystem, not the GPU, that is the main bottleneck of this graphics card.