Board Analysis

Fundamentally the cooling solution that Palit and Gainward have come up with is rather simple, but brutal in its effectiveness. Each RV770 graphics core has its own distinct heatsink/fan unit with copper heatpipes. More specifically, Palit equips each cooler with dual copper heatpipes (four heatpipes total). As you can see in the pictures, the heatsinks Palit employs to cool the heatpipes are actually dual-slot, and aren't as massive as you'd initially imagine. The third slot is devoted entirely for the dual fans, which reside one level above the GPU heatsinks.


But the heatpipes aren't the only part that uses copper. Resting directly above the RV770 GPUs is a copper plate which pulls heat off them. The heat is then transferred from this plate to the heatpipes, which are then cooled by the dual-slot aluminum heatsinks.

Flanking the copper plates is a larger black aluminum plate which is directly responsible for cooling the board's memory modules as well as the PWM circuitry. Here an aluminum heatsink is also used to assist in heat dissipation.


Here you can also see the card's power connectors. Rather than stick with ATI's design, which places the power connectors perpendicular to the edge of the PCB, Palit rotates them 90 degrees. This is a great move on Palit's part, as it actually makes it easier to plug in the power connectors.

Moving to the other side of the card we can see where Palit and Gainward have elected to add a VGA output to the card. Why they decided to do this we don't exactly know. Perhaps they wanted to show the world they could produce a card with every potential display output option any user would want or possibly need? Also present on the backplate of the Revolution 700 Deluxe is one DVI, one DisplayPort, and one HDMI (keep in mind that due to the limitations of ATI's CrossFire technology, you can't run all four displays simultaneously unless you disable CrossFire).


On the third level of the card's cooler reside the dual 80mm fans that are tasked with supplying the Revolution cooler with fresh air. Thanks to their size, the fans are able to cool the GPUs pretty effectively without generating a lot of noise, although one downside to Palit's cooling design is that the fans don't exhaust hot air from the GPUs outside the system case like the standard ATI cooler. Instead the air is dispersed mainly out the front and back of the card; so essentially some but not all of the air from the GPU is pushed outside your case.

For additional board cooling, Palit mounts a second aluminum plate on the underside of the card. This plate acts like a heatsink, drawing heat off the bottom of the PCB and thus helping to keep the card cooler. It also helps to cool the memory located on the bottom of the card.

Since it doesn't have any form of active cooling, this plate can get quite hot to the touch, especially after long gaming sessions. We should add that ATI's reference design also has a similar cooler on the bottom of the 4870 X2.

Clock speeds

Here's where Palit and Gainward's cards begin to differ. Whereas Gainward overclocks the graphics core (790MHz) and memory (950MHz) on their Rampage700 Golden Sample Goes Like Hell, the graphics core on the Palit Revolution 700 Deluxe isn't OC'ed at all, running at the stock 4870 X2 GPU speed of 750MHz. Only the Revolution's memory is overclocked, running at the same 950MHz clock speed as Gainward's Rampage700 GS GLH.

This speed is 50MHz higher than stock (by percentage the OC is 5%), yielding an effective clock rate of 3.8GHz.

Considering the massive cooler Palit has integrated on the Revolution 700 Deluxe, it's a little perplexing why Palit elected not to OC the graphics core on their 4870 X2 card, especially since their sister company Gainward did so with their Rampage card, which uses the exact same hardware as Palit. By limiting their OC to the Revolution board's memory, its performance boost over the stock 4870 X2 is limited, but fortunately as we're about to show you the card runs significantly cooler and quieter than the stock ATI 4870 X2 card. This in turn helps the board OC to higher clock speeds.

Accessories

The Revolution 700 Deluxe ships with one of the smallest bundles of hardware accessories we've seen. Included inside the box is one 8-pin-to-6-pin PCIe adapter (helpful for those of you who don't have 8-pin PCIe 2.0 compliant power supplies), and one HDMI-to-DVI adapter. That's it. Palit doesn't include a CrossFire bridge cable with the Revolution 700 Deluxe card, nor do they include an additional power adapter.

We can excuse the lack of a 6-pin power adapter, but we do feel that the card does need some type of CrossFire cable. Back when CrossFire was first announced ATI told us that all their board partners were required to include a CrossFire cable in order to obtain CrossFire certification, but it seems that the company has gotten rather lax in enforcing this rule, as we've also noticed a number of MSI Radeon cards that also shipped recently without a CrossFire bridge cable.