Installation

Well, what is to be said here? Installation is straight forward as always. The only thing that might prove a little difficult is installing the additional PEG power connector onto the card after it has been seated in its slot.
I would recommend that users first plug the power cable into the card, and then seat it into its slot. When removing the card, first pull it out of the slot, and then unplug the power cable. Or, alternatively, you could use tweezers.



One thing that is also worth noting is that the AC Silencer might have problems when running on a BTX setup (as well as a flipped ATX motherboard). It was purely random that I happened to notice this, and that was while “playing” with the card before I installed it. What happens is that when the card is placed with the fan facing upwards, the fan touches the plastic beneath it, and, when spun with a finger, it makes a grinding noise. When the card is turned with the fan pointing downwards, the grinding noise disappears, and the fan spins freely.

After I successfully installed the card, I booted up my computer. After the computer is switched on, the fan runs for about 3 seconds at full blast, and then becomes quiet, spinning at 54% of its maximum speed. I must say though, that the card is not dead silent. This is probably not due to the fan itself, but due to the fact that the air is rushing through a tunnel. With the Arctic Cooling Silencer's construction, this noise can hardly be avoided.
What is rewarding though, is the fact that the temperatures are simply amazing: with stock clocks, the card idles at about 31°C (8°C above room temperature) – not bad at all, considering that this is an air cooler. The load temperatures are around 55°C, a whole lot better than what the stock cooler is capable of.

Also, the card comes up as an ATI X850 Series card with 16 pipelines in the drivers straight away - no intervention, such as BIOS flashing, is required from user side.

Overclocking

Our test sample was able to reach 535 MHz on the core and 580 MHz (1160 MHz DDR) on the memory. The card behaved rather strangely when we tried to pass the 550 MHz barrier. It showed no artifacts, but shut down instead. We were unable to find any solution to this problem.

Test System