Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 X2 Atomic WaterCooled preview

[Chierin]

I hope you all had a good weekend. Now that ATI's dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 has enjoyed a couple of months as the company's flagship graphics offering, we're starting to see some more interesting designs away from the board's reference cooler. One of the more extreme examples of this looking to hit the market soon comes courtesy of Sapphire, who have given us an early preview of the latest part in their new Atomic range, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 Atomic WaterCooled. With some modest factory overclocks and an easy to use built-in water cooling system for the board, the potential is obvious, but can it live up to it? Connected to the board and water block is a unit which contains the pump, reservoir, radiator and a 120mm fan for cooling. This fan is connected to the graphics board itself to both power the fan and allow for temperature monitoring so that fan speed is automatically adjusted dependant on the heat being produced by the GPU. When idling at the Windows Vista desktop, this fan often doesn't need to spin up at all, and even when running graphically intensive titles at factory clock speeds we only ever saw it needing to run at its lowest fan speed. While the noise from this fan coupled with the water cooler's pump is certainly noticeable at all times, I'd hesitate to call it 'loud' per se, its volume level seems pretty acceptable for the average system to me, although you may disagree if you're looking to produce a near-silent high-end setup.

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