Testing

I’ll be testing the cooler on a Connect3D X1950 Pro card which has the stock cooler installed. The card will be running in a Lian Li PC-B20 case with the side graphics card 120mm fan removed as most people don’t have one.

The case is closed during testing and there is one front 120mm fan and one rear 80mm to provide case ventilation. The AM2 3800+ CPU is cooled by a Thermaltake Max Orb and the system is powered by an Enermax Liberty 400w.

The ambient has constantly at 19C throughout the testing.

The temperature was taken with the onboard thermal diode on the X1950, and monitored by ATI Tray Tools taking measurements every tenth of a second.

To load the card, RTHDRIBL was used at 1600x1200 with 16x multisampling which ran at 5fps which shows that the card was being fully used. The test phase ran for 30minutes after 30minutes of idling.

The stock heatsink and fan present on the X1950 Pro was set for automatic function where the fan speed changes depending on the temperature in order to keep noise levels down. I tested with automatic mode enabled which ran the fan at 40%, and then force the fan at 100% for the second test. At 40% is audible and even more so at 100%. Neither speed could be categorised as silent or quiet.

The results are shown as idle temperatures plus load difference.

The GX7*0 fans are ridiculously quiet and are welcome in a quiet/silent case. With the noise dampening sides of the Lian Li case on, I couldn’t hear anything from it. Even up close it was a job to hear it.

As you can see from the results, the coolers aren’t any more capable that the stock cooler. That said, this is the highest card that the cooler can support, and the stock cooler of X1950 Pro was heralded as the best. The one thing that the GX7*0’s win on though, is noise. Silence is all you will hear from these coolers.

Just because the cooler can be used on high end cards, doesn’t necessarily mean it should. It’s nice to have the option, but these coolers are a little out of their depth at this level. If you want a cooler for these type cards, choose the GX810 which is a copper version with fins that go nearly 360 degrees around the fan resulting in more surface area. XSReviews will have an article posted shortly.