Sapphire Blizzard X1900 XTX water-cooled graphics card

We have it on good authority that ATI would love to use the same sort of cooling package that Nvidia employs but it's simply not possible: the X1900 produces too much heat. Take it from us, a pair of high-end ATI cards in CrossFire is nigh-on unbearable unless you wear close-fitting headphones, and this gives the graphics card manufacturers a conundrum. The X1900 is, as we've said, a fine graphics chip but the cooling is a nightmare that detracts from the appeal of the graphics card. Sapphire has come up with a novel solution in the shape of a liquid cooling package from Thermaltake that is pre-installed on a Radeon X1900 XTX. This is the Tide Water mini system and it's exclusive to Sapphire for the time being.

The graphics card looks amazingly spartan without the conventional heatsink, duct and fan, and instead has tiny finned coolers on the memory chips and a water block on the GPU. Two 1cm-diameter rubber hoses carry coolant to the cooling module which plugs into a PCI slot to hold it in place. The PCI slot doesn't have any electrical function as the Tide Water cooler connects to a four-pin Molex connector to power the fan and pump. Although the Blizzard card that we tested uses a conventional double-slot bracket this is completely unnecessary and Sapphire is talking about including the option of a single bracket or a way of mounting the Tide Water module on the bracket, but right now this is, in total, a three-slot design.

The hoses are long enough and flexible enough to allow you to plug the two parts of the package in whichever slots you like on your motherboard. Incidentally, the Tide Water mini looks very similar to a Leadtek FX5900 that we saw back in 2003.

There's a switch on the cooler so you can select a low or high speed for the fan as it draws air from inside the case and forces it through the copper cooler. The Low setting gives a fan speed of 2,000rpm and a claimed noise level of 18dBA, while the High setting of 2,500rpm gives a level of 26dBA, which is about eight times louder. We did our testing on the low setting, and the Blizzard remained nice and cool. The card was noticeably quieter than a regular X1900. On High, however, the Blizzard sounded much like an air-cooled X1900, which makes it rather pointless.

In fact, it's worse than that because the Low/High switch is inside the case where you can't reach it and the ATI Catalyst drivers don't control the Tide Water unit as the fan is on a dumb switch. An air-cooled X1900 only spins up to full speed when it is under load but the Blizzard will work at the same speed no matter what you're doing.