Noise and 2D Quality

The first launch of the system with an installed RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition brought us recollections of the legendary GeForce FX 5800 Ultra – the full-speed fan was very loud. The noise tended towards high frequencies, thus being the more annoying. The sealed casing played a bad trick, too. It seems to be a kind of resonator, amplifying the sound of the fan and adding a plastic-like tone to its melody. Standing close to the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition was not for people with weak nerves then.

Fortunately, this nightmare was over in less than 5 seconds as the card dropped the fan speed, also reducing its noise, although not completely. The fan was working at the reduced speed hereafter, in spite of the heavy job the graphics card did in our tests. The card never attempted to increase the fan speed in our tests, so we should consider the noise of the new cooling system from ATI as acceptable. Moreover, our testbed is in fact a mainboard on a soft stand – in order to quickly install and uninstall various graphics cards we don’t put this mainboard into a system case as normal users do, and in a PC case the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is going to be even quieter.

So, ATI’s new cooling system did well enough, providing efficient cooling at a comfortable noise level.

The image quality in 2D applications was traditionally good in all the resolutions up to 1600x1200@85Hz inclusive.

OVERDRIVE 3: Dynamic Overclocking May Need a Fix

Along with the release of the RADEON 9600 XT and the RADEON 9800 XT a little bit more than a year ago ATI Technologies introduced its OVERDRIVE capability that allowed dynamic overclocking of VPUs when that was possible. The first incarnation of the technology was not a real success: it granted very tiny performance boost and did not work on some graphics cards. With the release of the RADEON X850 XT and some other upcoming products ATI brings OVERDRIVE back under the name of OVERDRIVE 3, pledging to give higher performance boost via substantial overclocking and with valid warranty.

The new OVERDRIVE boasts with auto-detection of the maximum speed and ability to allow overclocking up to 648MHz/1292MHz for chip/memory, which is not that high, but pretty notable. In case your graphics card is over-overclocked, VPU recover is supposed to down the speeds to the default levels. Certainly, performance level provided by the OVERDRIVE 3 is expected to be much higher compared to previous version of the technology.

Unfortunately, current hardware and software complex in our possession did not allow OVERDRIVE to operate well: even with auto-detection of overclock levels (567MHz/1202MHz from 540MHz/1180MHz by default is not an extreme overclocking, isn’t it?) the desktop was corrupted and the FarCry game was displayed with massive amount of artifacts. Furthermore, when we tried the 3DMark05 and the Doom III, we got the same situation with artifacts and, more importantly, the graphics card froze.

We attribute the failure of the OVERDRIVE 3 to problematic BIOS version, immature graphics card or certain issues with the software. Probably finalized products will not run into such problems, but customers should be aware of potential issues of the OVERDRIVE 3 in certain configurations.

In overall, the OVERDRIVE 3 is a good idea, even though you should not expect performance increase of more than 5% - 6% when OVERDRIVE is activated. However, there is some work to be done with it.