RADEON X700 XT: Noise and 2D Quality

Returning to the issue of noise, we should confess our comprehensions were well grounded – the small and fast fan with a not-very-optimal design of the blades was rather loud even in the 2D mode when it was working at a reduced speed. When speeding up to its full in 3D, it became really annoying, at least in an open system case. Subjectively, this fan was louder than the noise from the cooler of the GeForce 6800 Ultra working at its maximum speed, although this latter has to cool a much more complex and hot chip than the X700. By the way, the sample of the X700 we dealt with was rather hot at work, in spite of the 0.11-micron tech process.

Still, you should remember that it was only an engineering sample of the card, only a few days old. That’s why we can’t say that off-the-shelf RADEON X700 cards are going to be as hot and noisy. By the way, it is rather strange to see such a regress in cooling systems on ATI graphics cards. Until now, all of the company’s cooling solutions have been most caring about the user’s ears – the coolers on the RADEON 9800 XT and the RADEON X800 XT/PRO were practically silent. Again, we hope they will improve the cooling of the X700 before the card reaches shops.

There were no problems with 2D quality – the card was outputting a sharp picture in all the display resolutions, like any decent modern graphics card should do.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t examine the overclocking properties of the new graphics processor due to time constraints, but we anyway carried out a few theoretical tests you are invited to look at right now.