Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2006/03/27/review_sapphire_blizzard/

Sapphire Blizzard X1900 XTX water-cooled graphics card

Thermaltake to the rescue?

By Leo Waldock

Posted in Personal Tech, 27th March 2006 13:17 GMT

Exclusive ATI's Radeon X1900 is a darned fine graphics chip but while it has taken the fight to Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GTX in no uncertain terms it also produces plenty of heat. When ATI updated the Radeon X1800 core to produce the X1900 it increased the number of pixel shaders from 16 to 48, and in the process it raised the transistor count from 321m to a phenomenal 380m, with the core covering an area of 352 square millimetres. As a result, an X1900 graphics card draws about 150W from your power supply almost all of which ends up dissipated as heat...

sapphire blizzard radeon x1900 xtx

By contrast, when Nvidia moved from the GeForce 7800 GTX to the 7900 GTX it reduced the transistor count from 302m to 278m thanks to optimisations that shortened the length of the pixel pipelines. It also shrank the fabrication process from 110nm to the same 90nm that ATI was using and as a consequence the die area fell from the 7800 GTX's 334 square millimetres to 196 square millimetres. The 7900 GTX's power draw is less than 100W. We're not sure how much waste heat a 7900 GTX has to shed but we'd estimate that it's about 50W - half that of an X1900.

The transistor count and die area have a direct bearing on the cost of the graphics chip, but the power requirement and heat output affect the cooling of your graphics card and PC, as well as the type of power supply that you have to install to keep everything running sweetly.

You see this difference quite clearly when you lay a GeForce 7800 or 7900 next to a Radeon X1800 or X1900. The 256MB versions of the 7800 and 7900 use a single-slot design that sheds waste heat inside the PC case and as a result are fairly quiet in operation. Your PC should be able to handle the heat without too much trouble. The 512MB versions run at much higher core and memory speeds so Nvidia fitted a huge heatsink that uses four heatpipes to vent heat from the copper spreader plate out through a vent in the bracket. This could potentially be quite noisy - hands up anyone who remember the FX5800 - so Nvidia has used an enormous 80mm fan that turns so slowly you can practically count the blades on the fan as it rotates. In operation, a 512MB 7900 GTX is effectively silent.

While a mid-range ATI card can be used on single-slot board, the performance models use a double-slot design. The heatsink is covered by a duct, and as the fan rotates it draws air from inside the case and passes it through the duct and across the heatsink. It is then expelled through vents in the bracket and is at best noisy and at worst rather annoying.

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.

sapphire blizzard radeon x1900 xtx

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.

sapphire blizzard water-cooled graphics card

The Blizzard X1900 XTX runs a core speed of 648MHz core with an effective memory speed of 1.55GHz, which gave a score of 11,069 in 3DMark05 using a Sapphire A9RD580Adv motherboard, an FX-57 processor and 1GB of Kingston KX4300 memory.

We used the Catalyst 6.3 drivers to increase the core to speed 690MHz and the memory to 1.6GHz (the highest settings available) which raised the 3DMark05 score to 11,325 marks. Throughout we measured temperatures of 40° on the water block and memory heatsinks with 30° at the exhaust vent of the Tide Water cooler.

sapphire blizzard radeon x1900 xtx

For the record, a conventional Sapphire X1900 XT, which runs at 621MHz/1.44GHz, can also be overclocked to 690MHz/1.6GHz on the same test system. We've never been convinced that the XTX premium of £40-50 is worth paying over the XT, and the Blizzard ups that premium to about £100.

sapphire blizzard radeon x1900 xtx

The Sapphire package includes all the company's usual bits and pieces, including cables, DVI adaptors, PowerDVD 6, PowerDirector 4 and the Sapphire Select game package that allows you to try four games and then install the one you prefer. That's all good stuff but the Blizzard succeeds or fails on the appeal of the Tide Water cooling system and its price, and this is where we have a few issues.

The X1900 is - just - better than the 7900 GTX. However, if you play specific games you may well find that the reverse is true. The Blizzard removes the main concern we have about X1900, ie. the noise, but it can do nothing about the fact that we have a personal preference for Forceware drivers over Catalyst.

We also prefer SLI to CrossFire as it's a more mature system and at present there are no plans to introduce a Blizzard X1900 XTX CrossFire master card so gamers will be stuck with a single graphics card unless they run a noisy air-cooled Master card alongside their Blizzard.

Funnily enough, the price is the least of our concerns as there are plenty of premium graphics cards on sale for £499 - £60-80 more than the Blizzard is expected to cost.

Verdict

Deciding whether you should buy a Radeon X1900 or a GeForce 7900 GTX is a tough decision, but on balance we would favour the Nvidia card because it's quieter and has better drivers. Blizzard changes that and means that we now vote for the X1900 provided you have no plans to run more than one graphics card inside your gaming PC. ®