Beneath the Asetek hardware, the Sapphire Atomic is a regular HD 4870 X2 graphics card so it is horribly long and may be tricky to install inside your PC, although the water cooling helps as it converts the Atomic into a single-slot design.
3DMark Vantage Performance Mode Results
Blue bars used a Core i7 965 at 4GHz
Red bars used a Core 2 QX9650 at 3GHz
Longer bars are better
Sapphire has used the precise cooling control that is offered by the switch from air to water and has raised the clock speed from 750MHz/900MHz to 800MHz/1000MHz, which is a bigger step than it sounds as the memory on HD 4870 is GDDR 5. This makes the new effective speed 4000MHz rather than 3600MHz.
Installing the Atomic on our overclocked 4GHz Core i7 system was easy as we simply left the CPU cooler and heat exchanger hanging from the edge of the board in an undignified manner. The difference in noise level between the standard HD 4870 X2 and the Atomic was quite immediately apparent. Although the Atomic isn’t silent it's certainly very quiet with both the pump and fan making less noise than the Noctua NH-C12P with LGA1366 mounting kit. It’s a very effective cooler and we really should do an in-depth review soon.
3DMark06 Results
Blue bars used a Core i7 965 at 4GHz
Red bars used a Core 2 QX9650 at 3GHz
Longer bars are better
The standard HD 4870 X2 delivered storming performance across the board and very nearly matched the Atomic, which was something of a surprise as the extra clock speed used by Sapphire had little effect. We verified this by overclocking the reference card from 750MHz/900MHz to 800MHz/925MHz and found that this small amount of extra speed had no noticeable effect in our benchmark tests.
COMMENTS
world's most expensive graphics board
Not heard of nVidia Quardro cards then?
I wonder if Atomic has seen this?
As in 'Atomic' magazine - the Australian gaming computer mag - whose logo looks a lot like the one ATi seem to have, er, borrowed.
Warranty
> Doing the same for your graphics card is a different proposition as you have to dismantle the
> original cooler before you attach the VGA water block and hook it into the cooling loop.
Eh, you lose warranty on the motherboard when you install water cooling on your PC too. That's because most water cooling solutions also come with a water cooling block that covers over the chipset. And if you're a gaming afficiando most likely you'd have a performance motherboard that has a chipset fan. And of course, most likely you're going to remove the chipset fan for the water block anyway.
Personally, tho, I went the way of convectional cooling. Sure, it requires my air conditioner to be at full blast and my rig's case to have half a dozen fans installed (and thus sound like a mini jet engine), but it beats the fear of the cooling system springing a leak and causing a shortout.
Problems with math?
Leaving aside the scoring, as it has been covered by another comment:
"we can't imagine anyone spending £590 on a graphics card. If we take a charitable view, you're paying £400 for the graphics card and £100 for the water-cooling hardware."
I can't imagine how £400 + £100 somehow equates anywhere near to £590. Do you somehow get a £90 discount for taking "a charitable view"?
Reviewer = Tool
"Did you hear that whooshing noise? That was the sound of your warranty flying out through the window."
Didnt bother reading more after seeing this because the reviewers obviously a tool. EVGA give you a lifetime warranty on the card EVEN IF you tear off the stock heatsink and add a water block so long as you send the parts back in the same box if it blows up. Do your bloody research
