Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
Got mine yesterday and was able to play around with it a little. Turns out it is pretty much an X800XL, although I have yet to see how well it overclocks - I'm not expecting much considering just like the X800XL, it doesn't have an external power connector.
Originally posted by: breweyez
I am interested in this deal. I would like to know how loud the fan is on this card. Would it be noticable on a system (like mine) that is fairly quiet? Any reviews?
The card as-is certainly doesn't need any sort of serious cooling, but they designed the HS/fan so that it doesn't take up two or more slots like we're now seeing with high end cards, thus it does end up producing some noise. Granted it isn't terrible when in 2D (it's the loudest component in my once near-silent system), but it can get up there when playing games (although I would describe myself as picky).
I think another bad thing about the heat sink's design is that it doesn't respond to dust very well. My first X800XL from 2 years ago had the exact same HS/fan and once it started filling up with dust the temps really skyrocketed to the point where I was actually getting rendering artifacts. Cleaning it out worked but I went one step further and swapped in a 3rd party HS/fan which not only drastically lowered idle and load temps, I could run it silent. Although this sacrificed the single slot design, but that was never a concern of mine considering my motherboard's primary PCI-e x16 slot allowed for two-slot coolers...
I also recall 3rd party manufacturers producing this card with just heatsinks (although big ones) for true noiseless operation.
Cliffs:
1. Card doesn't produce terrible noise, but single slot design requires some fan movement resulting in audible noise in an already
silent or near-slient system.
2. After market HS/fan can easily make the card silent or near-silent, even under full load.
