passive PowerColor SCS X700XT

Wraith · Post by **Wraith** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:05 pm

TUL goes for heatpipiping on X700XT

Dual DVI fruitfly

By Fuad Abazovic in Wien: Tuesday 16 November 2004, 14:03
SAPPHIRE EXPERIMENTED with silent cards and it even did it for high end cards but this time TUL has decided to follow suit.

The company just introduced a X700XT card completely passive heatpipe cooled model. Many complained about X700XT stock cooling so this might be a perfect opportunity. The card is clocked at 475/475MHz and it has 256MB GDDR 3 memory and naturally has support for eight pipelines and six vertex Shader units. Dual DVI for around $200+ might be a good deal with decent PCIe graphics for a dual TFT user.

In the standard retail pack you get a thermal detector to monitor your card and an active fan in case you want to cool it. I guess you don’t have to use it but it's nice to have. Hitman Contract game and lot of Cyberlink DVD software is bundled with it. The card should be available in the next few weeks. µ

PowerColor SCS X700XT

Kevin Ar18 · Post by **Kevin Ar18** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 1:57 pm

Thanks for the information. I added it to the post here:
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... 333#132333

BTW, there was an issue where Powercolor supposedly mis-represented a Radeon 9800 XT product in the past. (I haven't actually read enough to confirm with 100% certainty that it was done in the real world.)
http://www.community.tomshardware.com/f ... apsed&sb=5
Scroll down to section dealing with Powercolor.

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Tue Nov 16, 2004 2:02 pm

Its PCIe *sob*. I hope someone makes an AGP version of a really fast passive GPU for us mere mortals. So for only Gigabyte have a 6800, but thats a bit slow.

Maybe Zalman may come to our rescue.

EasyRaider · Post by **EasyRaider** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 3:23 am

luminous wrote:Its PCIe *sob*. I hope someone makes an AGP version of a really fast passive GPU for us mere mortals. So for only Gigabyte have a 6800, but thats a bit slow.

Well, it's faster than the X700XT. If you want faster than 6800 and passive, I'd say your only chance is X800Pro. The thermal output is very similar to 6800, I think.

(edit)
If you have seen benchmarks with low numbers for the Gigabyte 6800, it's probably because an early BIOS only enabled 8 pipelines.

Bjorn3d.com wrote:I had an outstanding question with Gigabyte on this, and a contact there has confirmed that the BIOS included on early versions of the board enabled only eight of the chip's pixel pipelines. The latest BIOS updates the board to have 12 active pipelines like a 6800 should have, and the mystery of the performance boost is solved!

anthonysimilion · Post by **anthonysimilion** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 3:38 am

A X800PRO passive?!

luminous · Post by **luminous** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 5:22 am

The benchmarks that I have seen refer to the 6800 only being as quick as a 6600GT. Given that the 6800 costs a lot more, thats not a particularly good deal.

If the Gigabyte 6800 is reasonably quicker than a 6600GT then it may well be worth the extra money.

EasyRaider · Post by **EasyRaider** » Thu Nov 18, 2004 5:46 am

There are many scenarios where the 6800 is substantially faster (mainly when AA or shadowmapping is in use). But I agree it's poor value.

Cooling an X800Pro passively shouldn't be too hard with decent airflow. AFAIK it's barely hotter than the 6800.

(Note: AnandTech reports that enabling anisotropic filtering (which I regard as important for image quality) causes texture shimmering in HL2 with all modern cards. I think I will stick with my trusty GF Ti4200-8x (270/DDR540) w/ Zalman heatsink.)