Performance

After the initial installation, I removed the heatsink to inspect the contact area. I was impressed to see that the thermal compound was almost completely squeezed away in the middle. The ATI logo is clearly visible on both the core and the heatsink.
It would have been nice if the contact near the edges was a bit better, but as the benchmarks show, there are no problems with heat transfer at all.

Also you can see some smeared around thermal paste on the heatsink base. This is the result of the installation, during which it is very hard to not move the base.

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For the overclocking tests I used my ATITool overclocking utility version 0.24 Beta 5. 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.

Thermal testing was done on a Radeon X800 SE. The X800 SE has 8 pipelines and its heat output is well comparable to the X700 / 9800 Pro / 6600.



The X800SE does not use the same cooler as the rest of the X800 series. It uses a very small aluminum cooler which we know from some 9800 Pro models.

Temperature data was obtained by reading from the internal thermal diode of the R420 GPU chip. Idle temperature was measured after letting Windows sit one hour at the desktop. Load temperature was measured after running ATITool scanning for 30 minutes. Both at the card's default clocks of 425 MHz core and 400 MHz memory. Core overclocking tests were done with memory running at 500 MHz.

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.

The dynamic fan setting of the card changes fan speeds from 50% (idle) up to 80% (load). The stock cooler was also tested with forced 100% fan speed for better comparison.




I was extremely surprised by how well this completely fan- and noiseless cooler can keep up with the heat output of the X800 SE.

Thermaltake specifically points out in their manual, that they do not recommend overclocking when the Schooner is installed, but I just had to try.

A completely stable overclock of 122 MHz without any noise is just awesome. The Schooner's cooling potential is very similar to that of the stock cooler, minus noise.

Nothing can compete with watercooling in terms of overclocking performance, but getting high overclocks was not the design goal of the Schooner.

With those great results I had to try the Schooner on a bigger video card. Installation on the X800 Pro (12 Pipelines, 475 MHz core, 450 MHz memory) is exactly the same. The second installation was much easier, because I already knew where everything was going.

During normal 2D desktop and video playback usage the Schooner has no problems cooling the card (HTPC system *hint* *hint*). When heavily stressed, without any overclocking, the GPU temperature reaches 92°C.

I find this a bit high to be safe, especially if you consider that the test system has a watercooled CPU, so the inside temperature is not as high as in a normal case.


As a result of this testing I would say it is perfectly safe to use this cooler on any video with up to, and including, eight pipelines.

Value and Conclusion