Performance

After the initial installation the heatsink was immediately removed and the contact area was inspected. The contact is excellent, while we don't see the ATI logo shine through this time, the suction force was big enough to suck in some thermal paste near the edges. What I find also important to note is that the contact pattern seems to be very uniform around the die.

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For the overclocking tests I used my ATITool overclocking utility version 0.25 Beta 10. ATITool has the unique ability to detect artifacts, or flaws, in a rendered image. As defined by ATITool, the maximum stable overclock on a card is the speed at which it is able to consistently (15 minutes in this test) produce no errors, or artifacts. ATITool detects ANY artifacts, even ones which will not be visible in game. Using the human eye to detect artifacts introduces subjectivity into the test, so despite the fact that an ATITool tested overclock will be characteristically lower than a human one, I will use this.

Temperature was measured with one case side open by reading the on-die thermal diode of our X800 Pro PCI-Express. Idle temperature was measured after letting Windows sit one hour at the desktop. Load temperature was measured after running 3DMark2003 looped for one hour. Both at the card's default clock of 507 / 520 MHz.


We will be comparing the Thermalright V1 Ultra against this stock cooler of the X850 Pro. As you can see, the stock cooler has a copper base, is big and has memory cooling as well. Its cooling performance is comparable to an Arctic Cooling Silencer (just much more louder). The fan speed is varied based on temperature. For all temperatures below 65°C it is 54%. To have another value to compare to, I used ATITool to force the stock fan to always run at 100%.

Arctic Silver Lumière was used as thermal interface material for the GPU core in all installations. Lumière is a specially engineered testing compound - it needs no settle in time to reach its maximum performance, but it's not designed for permanent use.

In order to give you a feeling how well this cooler works on different fan speeds we ran the fan at the default of 12V and additionally 7V and 5V. The 7V setting can be achieved by connecting the red (5V) and the yellow (12V) cable from the PSU to the fan. 12V - 5V = 7V. This is perfectly safe even for permanent use and does not pose any risk to your components.




Wow. When I first had the cooler in my hands I would have never expected to see such good cooling performance. Even at the ultra-quiet 5V setting this cooler works better than the stock cooler. When you crank up the fan speed you can will get an amazing increase in your overclock. We reached 596 MHz here, with the Thermaltake Tribewater Watercooling unit we reached 591 MHz. While 5 MHz is not much effectively it still shows how well the Thermalright V1 Ultra will cool.