Performance

After the initial installation the heatsink was immediately removed and the contact area was inspected. Even with just two screws the contact is very good.

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For the overclocking tests I used my ATITool overclocking utility version 0.25 Beta 14. On the X1000 series artifact scanning isn't working (yet), so I used several tests including 3DMark2003 and 2005 to test for artifacts.

Temperature was measured with one case side open by reading the on-die thermal diode of our ATI Radeon X1800 XL 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 500 / 495 MHz.

On the X1800 the fan speed is varied based on temperature. The stock fan was running at 73% under load and 36% when idle. 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.




While the temperatures are a great deal better than the stock cooler the overclocking does not go up so much. Sure the increase is there but it's only about 10 MHz.

The biggest advantage over the stock cooler is that the Turbo 2 is doing its job with a lot less noise as you can read on the next page.