| Sapphire HD3870x2 Atomic H2O (1Gb DDR3) |
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Sapphire produces the World's ONLY watercooled Radeon HD3870x2 (right out of the box) ... and it's perfect for any hardcore gaming enthusiast
INTRODUCTION PC watercooling has always been an enthusiast's sacred stomping ground. With machines that can only be described as "insane" ... geeks of all ages just couldn't resist dribbling over a flawlessly made watercooled PC. However, this is all about to change as more and more gamers look towards watercooling. In a recent survey, a whopping 75% of PCs at LAN parties features some sort of watercooling. The notion is ... it's great to have watercooling. I think it's fun and it's got that wow factor, but best of all ... it makes your PC unique. In any watercooling setup, the main component is always the CPU. Lower CPU teps means better overall performance. Watercooling the processor is one thing, but watercooling a graphics card is another story all together. Most enthusiasts will use their existing watercooling setup to accommodate the additional watercooling for the graphics card. This is normally how one would do it. But this time, Sapphire has made it easy for gamers or enthusiast by introducing a totally self-contained and pre-installed watercooling system on their Atomic series.
Sapphire have already made a lot of innovative products, including the HD3870 Toxic featuring Vapor-X technology. And then, there are the award winning Atomic series ... the same cards but in a nicer packaging.
In this review, our CPU3D review team takes a look at the Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3870x2 Watercooled. It utilise two slightly overclocked ATI RV670 GPUs @ 860Mhz (default is 800Mhz), with 1Gb of DDR3 ram. What makes is card unique is obviously the pre-installed watercooling unit which is totally self-contained. The L-shaped watercooling unit actually houses the radiator, pump, resevior and 120mm cooling fan ... all of which is powered by a 4-pin molex cable (12v). Since this card card is watercooled, the GPU core temperatures should be lower than a standard GPU on air cooling. This would help tremendously, if you decide to further overclock the graphics card. Before we go any further, here's a brief re-cap on the ATI RV680 (2 x RV670 GPUs). Taken from AMD/ATI's website.
Dual-GPU technology
Over 1 teraFLOPS of GPU compute power
Incredible performance
ATI CrossFireX™
The real questions on everyone's mind is ... how easy is it really, to install this monster? And what about the price? Surely with a pre-installed watercooling unit, it would cost an arm and a leg. But surprisingly, it's not as expensive as you might think. Sapphire has done well over the past few years, producing good quality gaming cards for users of all types, from budget gamers all the way to high-end enthusiast gamers. The Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3780x2 Watercooled is no exception ... it's one of the World's first watercooled Radeon HD3870x2 (right out of the box).
We expect the performance of the Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3870x2 Watercooled to be very good and should outperform the other Radeon HD3870s with no problems at all. But how will it compete against a Geforce 9800GTX? For our tests, we'll be benchmarking the Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3870x2 Watercooled with several GPU intensive DX10 games ... with both 4xAA and 16xAF options enabled, as well as your usual 3DMark 2005 and 2006 tests. Our test rig comprises of an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ default 2.4Ghz, DFI LanParty DK X38 T2RB motherboard, OCZ DDR2-1066 2Gb kit, PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 860W PSU and a 19" Dell Ultrascan P990 monitor. All-in-all, it's a decently spec'd system for DX10 gaming. OK, lets not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Sapphire Atomic Radeon HD3870x2 Watercooled ...
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