Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality

Like any other RADEON X850/X800 series graphics card, the PowerColor X800 GT can control the speed of its fan depending on the temperature of the GPU. But unlike the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, the new card is not loud at the launch of the system – the fan works at a reduced speed right from the start. Its speed depends entirely on the GPU temperature afterwards. Our testbed was assembled in an open case, so we had no problems with its ventilation and the graphics card’s cooler never increased its speed during our tests. The noise from the fan remained in a comfortable range, but the card was not absolutely noiseless. In a badly ventilated closed system case the temperature of the graphics core may reach the limit at which the fan will start to speed up, producing more noise.

We succeeded in overclocking our sample of the PowerColor X800 GT to 560 MHz GPU and 570 (1140) MHz memory frequency. The graphics card was stable at these frequencies and passed all of our tests. This is not untypical for the R480 chip to overclock so well since this graphics processor is used in the RADEON X850 XT and XT Platinum Edition where it is clocked at 520-540MHz by default. We want to warn those users who will attempt to overclock their PowerColor X800 GT. The memory chips on the face side of the PCB do not touch the heat-spreader, so you should think putting thermal pads there or installing a fan to blow at the card from one side.

Nothing was wrong with the image quality the card provided in 2D applications. Like nearly all modern graphics cards, this one produced a sharp picture in all display modes, including 1800x1440@75Hz.