Saphire X1600PRO 256 AGP tinkering. 56Kwarning

[jaydee]

Not to sure were to put this being the reader workblogs are not working and no other section seems relevant at this point.

The main reason for this tinkering is to get an idea how the card performs on stock air cooling as next weekend I will add the Cooltechnica MP-1 GPU water block on the card and compare results.

Today I started tinkering with my new Saphire Radeon X1600Pro vid card I bought off Newegg a few weeks ago.


The card runs great stock. Plays BF2 wonderfully at 1028x768 high details. In fact it played to so much better than my old FX5500 I actually like playing the game again.

Today however I decided to make a few simple tests. The card has 2 built in temp probes that ATI Tool .25 beta can read. Accuracy? Who knows. Anyway ATI Tool also lets you overclock the cards memory and core.

With the stock cooler I got the following temps.

Stock Speed 500 core/405 mem.
At idle
GPU 59C/Other probe 44C
At load
GPU 75C/Other probe 50C

Overclocked to max stable OC 605 core/415 mem
At idle
GPU 61C/Other probe 44C
At load
GPU 82C /Other probe 53C


I decided to take the heat sink off and see how well the TIM joint was applied. I was pleasantly surprised to see a good amount of Silver TIM compound. Much better mount than any of the cards I ever owned.



I removed the Silver TIM and added my own with a much thinner layer thinking less is better like CPU applications.


I was however disappointed. The results were bad, very bad.
Stock Speed
At idle
GPU 75C/Other probe 50C

didn't bother trying to take a load temp as something was not right. I took the HS back off to find minimal contact whit the TIM. After trying a couple more times I had the same results.

So I decided to goop a lot more on this time much like the stock application was. This time it brought temps down to just a few C over the stock TIM application.

I think the white square pad is preventing the HS to make a good tight contact. That would better explain the massive amount of TIM applied.

Also note the little white pads the memory sits on. It doesn't appear to be any kind of TIM as it doesn't stick in any way. Maybe it is however. But if not it is just an insulator and probably causing more harm than good.


At first look it almost seem the memory cooler part is not actually to cool memory but to gain more surface area for the GPU to spread heat. The other side of the card has memory aswell with no type of cooler added which somewhat backs that up.

I am impressed with the card as it was only $130US and it has all the modern tech on it and seems to play current games pretty damn good. More next weekend with the water block installed.