Redesigning the RADEON Cooling Solution

I had to make heatsinks for memory chips cooling myself. Well, in fact I just took a chipset heatsink, sawed it into several pieces and polished all burrs off:

Sticky thermal pads from the Thermaltake Memory Cooling Kit were used to fasten the heatsinks onto the memory chips. Well, I know there are ways to make a better cooling, but still it is better than nothing. :)

The same Thermaltake Aquarius II water cooling solution was used for cooling the RADEON GPU. This is how the card looked just before the tests:

And here’s the testbed with PowerColor RADEON 9800 Pro based card installed:

The card was tested under the same conditions as the MSI NBOX: in the heat chamber at -15^oC:

So, we have our cards ready, let’s get to the tests…

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed configuration looked as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 3000MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4C800 mainboard (i875 chipset);
• 2512MB TwinMOS PC3200 DDR SDRAM, CL 2.5.

We used the following software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1;
• DirectX 9.0b;
• Catalyst 3.7 driver for the RADEON 9800 Pro based card;
• Detonator 45.23 driver for the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra based card.

The anisotropic filtering settings and texture level of detail were set in the drivers as “quality”. All the tests were performed with my own demo record made in Unreal Tournament 2003, the DM-Inferno level.

The graphics cards were only tested in 1600x1200 resolution. At such a high resolution, the CPU and the system don’t practically limit the performance and we will have the maximum relative performance gain achieved from overclocking the graphics card.

I ran Unreal Tournament 2003 in 32-bit color and with maximum graphics quality settings: Texture Detail – Highest, World Detail – Highest, Character Detail – Highest, Physics Detail – High, Character Shadows – ON, Dynamic Lighting – ON, Detail Textures – ON, Projectors – ON, Trilinear Filtering – ON, Decals – ON, Coronas – ON, Decals Stay – High, Foliage – ON, Use Blob Shadows – OFF.