Date: September 2nd, 2009
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: XFX
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PRODUCT PICTORIAL & WALKTHROUGH
Let's take a short walk around this videocard.
First thing that separates this card from the rest is the enormous GPU cooler strapped onto this mainstream videocard. With its temperature controlled fan, the size makes it a silent cooling solution seeing it barely has to stress at all to keep the GPU core temperatures under control.
The turbine fan quietly intakes air on the right side of the card and forces it through the large aluminum heatsink which then directly exhausts the air out of the case. This leads to lower overall internal case temperatures which stops any influence on the stability of other components within the case.
But the one thing that confused me was that this huge VGA cooler was only being used to cool the GPU core. Surely this cooler has the clout to cool the eight 64meg GDDR5 chips with little to no issues if they used a bigger baseplate. But seeing they used this cooler, the memory is essentially starved of any airflow at all. Infrared temperature testing had the modules heating up to a toasty 85-90c during stress testing. A HD4770 using the reference cooler seen in my previous Sapphire review
HERE had the same chips being cooled to about 40-50c during the same conditions.
Now this might not really have any bearing under stock conditions, but it might lead to a lower product life span and overclocking experience. And basically, when it comes to overclocking, the hotter memory did lead to a 10Mhz drop in overall memory overclock over the same videocard with the reference cooler. It just seems to be a waste to cooler the core alone.
Moving along, the fan end of the card is pretty simple with only the one 6 pin molex connector to point out. You can use the included adapter or use the 6 pin connector included with any recent power supply from a brand name manufacturer.
And on the business end you have the two DVI, the HD dongle connection along with the exhaust vent. Pretty standard fare but complete for a mainstream videocard.
So with that being said, how does it overclock?
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