X-bit labs

MSI RX2600XT Diamond 512 Graphics Card: A Jewel of HD 2600 XT Carats (page 5)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 10/19/2007 | 09:16 AM ]

Noise and Overclockability

We measured the level of noise produced by the MSI card 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 the working testbed with a passively cooled graphics card inside was 43dBA. We got the following results:

The cooling system installed on the RX2600XT is not just powerful, it is even redundant for such a modest card as ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. That’s why its fan can rotate at a small speed to cool the card successfully. As a result, the cooler is virtually silent, matching the best reference coolers from ATI and Nvidia.

Unfortunately, our attempt to overclock the MSI RX2600XT Diamond 512 was not much of a success. The memory with a rated frequency of 1100 (2200) MHz but clocked at 1150 (2300) MHz proved to have little potential. The card was only stable at a memory frequency of 1179 (2358) MHz. The graphics core had been overclocked by the manufacturer from 800MHz to 850MHz and the driver reported a frequency growth to 857MHz only. Such a modest growth of frequencies cannot result in a considerable performance gain. That’s why we decided not to benchmark the RX2600XT Diamond 512 at the overclocked frequencies.