Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality

The acoustic characteristics of the PowerColor X850 XT Platinum Edition AGP are identical to those of all RADEON X850 cards that use the reference cooling system. That is, the device is loud the first few seconds after you have started the computer, but then the speed of the fan goes down and the card becomes very quiet, if not completely silent. We had a period of hot weather here at the time of our tests, but the fan never tried to speed up, which was another confirmation of the high efficiency of ATI’s reference cooler.

We had predictable results at overclocking, making the GPU work at 570MHz (30MHz above the default). The memory was even better than expected, overclocking to 1300MHz. We sometimes saw image artifacts at this frequency, though, and had to step it down to 1280MHz. That’s a good result for 1.6ns chips rated for 1200MHz clock rate. To make sure the memory wouldn’t overheat, we set an additional 120mm fan from A.C.Ryan to blow at the overclocked card during our tests.

The quality of the image in 2D applications was sharp in all resolutions up to 1800x1400@75Hz. We also attached our Dell P1110 monitor to the card’s DVI output via an adapter, but noticed no worsening of the image, either.