PowerColor to Supply Dual-Card Packages with Liquid Cooling

by Anton Shilov
02/27/2006 | 12:28 PM

In an attempt to boost popularity of the CrossFire multi-GPU technology by ATI, one of its exclusive partners – Tul Corp., which is best known for PowerColor graphics cards – will sell packages containing two graphics cards and a liquid cooling system. The action will target primarily enthusiast in budget, who do not acquire high-end graphics accelerators.

At CeBIT 2006 trade show in Hannover, Germany, in March PowerColor will showcase “a unique CrossFire package that includes two graphics cards and a dual liquid-cooling system”. The package will include two ATI Radeon X1600 XT graphics cards along with a special EVO2 liquid-cooling system. For operation of such bundle a special mainboard with two PCI Express x16 slots, or more advanced, will be needed.

“This combination allows gamers to take advantage of multi-graphics cards gaming power and shun the torment of fan noise,” a statement by PowerColor read.

ATI Radeon X1600 XT graphics processor sports 12 pixel processors, 5 vertex processors and 4 texture units. The chip works at 590MHz and is equipped with 1380MHz 128-bit memory. Theoretically, two Radeon X1600 XT graphics cards can demonstrate performance similar to the Radeon X1800 XT, but in reality multi-GPU technologies, such as Nvidia Scalable Link Interface (SLI) or ATI CrossFire, cannot boast with maximum efficiency and two mainstream graphics processing units (GPUs) are not necessarily as fast as one high-end one.

Pricing and availability details regarding the set of two PowerColor Radeon X1600 XT boards and EVO2 cooling system were not unveiled. Earlier GeCube, another maker of ATI-based graphics cards, said it would release a graphics card model featuring two Radeon X1600 XT GPUs in April, 2006.