PCB Design and Cooling System

The design of the PCB of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 differs somewhat from Radeon X850 XT/X800 XL. The PowerColor X800 GT uses an analogous design, though.

The placement of some capacitors and inductance coils in the top left corner is different. Two switch transistors are missing on the reverse side of the PCB, too. These are not necessary considering the low clock rates and, accordingly, the low power consumption of the card.

There is no video-capture Rage Theater chip on board, but an additional power connector with its accompanying elements is present. We don’t quite grasp PowerColor’s idea here. The X800 GTO 16 has the same parameters as the Radeon X800 XL which does well without external power. Of course, the additional power source may add stability to the card at overclocking, but the heart of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is the R430 chip whose frequency potential is next to zero, so we really can’t find a good reason for that onboard power connector.

Having removed the cooler and a layer of thick dark-gray thermal paste we really saw an R430 chip there:

This chip is dated the fifth week of the last year, i.e. the very end of January, so it is over one year old. We seem to be right supposing large stores of out-dated GPUs at ATI Technologies and its partners. A curious fact, the die is marked as Radeon X800 Pro although such graphics cards were not supposed to be based on the R430. The X800 series on this chip was supposed to consist of two models: the 16-pipelined Radeon X800 XL and the 12-pipelined Radeon X800. The graphics core works at 400MHz; widely employed K4J55323QF-GC20 chips of GDDR3 from Samsung are installed here. The total amount of graphics memory is 256MHz; it is clocked at 490 (980) MHz.

The cooling system of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is exactly like the one installed on the PowerColor X800 GT and PowerColor X800 GTO VIVO. It only lacks the colorful sticker. The cooler consists of a simple aluminum heatsink which is blown at by an axial fan and is covered with an air-directing casing. There are no special technological tricks like heat pipes or something, here.

This cooler did well on the above-mentioned graphics cards from PowerColor, so there’s no reason for it to be incapable of handling the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, too. Besides high cooling efficiency, it also features good noise characteristics. Unfortunately, there is still no thermal interface between the memory chips and the heatsink’s sole, so the memory may overheat, especially at overclocking, if your system case is poorly ventilated.

Well, your overclocking attempts with this graphics card are unlikely to be well rewarded, as it is the case with all R430-based devices, and we don’t think the additional power will have a big positive effect on the result. 450-460MHz is the best we can hope for, and most likely a frequency gain of 30-40MHz is what we’ll get. The memory may be stable at 550 (1100) MHz depending on your luck. We’ll tell you in the next section how lucky we were with our sample of the PowerColor X800 GTO 16.