Cooling cont’d and Higher Speeds

Tight fit

Hoses are snugly secured to waterblock

Water line here

One potential issue that’s always a concern when dealing with liquid cooling is leakage. As you can imagine, if one of the hoses were to spring a leak or come loose, it could really spoil your day.

Fortunately we can report that this doesn’t appear to be an issue with the Radeon X1900 XTX Blizzard. The hoses on our review sample card were fit quite snugly – it would take quite a bit of force to loosen them, not that you’d want to anyway.

Slim-profile

Stock cooling here

Two-slot design

One common misconception that existed when Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX was first announced was that it would require three slots in your system. This is not true. The rumor probably got started in large part because the first batch of images released by Sapphire of prototype Blizzard X1900 XTX boards utilized the same 2-slot back plate used on regular Radeon X1900 XTX cards. People saw the pictures of the back plate and assumed that the waterblock was tall enough to occupy the second slot adjacent to your graphics card. In actuality though the Blizzard’s waterblock isn’t that tall, it’s certainly taller than the heatsink/fan unit used on say the Radeon X1600 XT or a GeForce 7600 GT card, but definitely not tall enough to prevent you from installing a second device next to the Blizzard board. The screws used to fasten the waterblock to the card are the tallest part on the card itself, and they certainly won’t get in the way of anything that may be located near the card.

In fact, by separating the Blizzard cooling enclosure from the rest of the Radeon X1900 XTX card, it gives the end user the freedom to place the Blizzard cooler practically anywhere he or she wants inside the system case. The hoses used to connect the two components are about 13” long, so you could place the Blizzard cooler on the opposite end of your system’s motherboard if you wanted to and probably still have a little bit of room to work with, or you could place the two components next to each other if you’d like.

In other words, Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX card takes up just as many slots as any other X1900 XTX card on the market. In fact, it’s actually a little more flexible than your typical X1900 XTX card because you can place the Blizzard cooling enclosure anywhere you’d like. In fact, on some motherboard’s you may even be able to place it above your graphics card depending on how your motherboard’s North Bridge and your system case are situated.

The rest of the cooling

Other than the Blizzard cooling unit, the rest of Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX card is fairly stock. Here we should note that like Thermaltake’s TideWater liquid cooling unit, the memory modules on Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX aren’t actively cooled by the liquid cooler, instead Sapphire relies on your typical RAMsinks to cool the memory. Sitting atop each of the board’s eight 1.1ns memory modules is a small aluminum heatsink. Sapphire doesn’t do anything special to cool the other hotspot on their Blizzard X1900 XTX board either -- flanking the VRMs is the same red aluminum heatsink ATI and all of their board partners use to cool the power circuitry on their X1900 XTX cards.

Higher clock speeds

Besides outfitting their Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX with an enhanced cooler, Sapphire has also bumped up the clock speeds on their Blizzard board for better performance. Whereas your typical X1900 XTX card ships with its GPU clocked at 650MHz, the GPU on Sapphire’s Blizzard card runs at 675MHz, 25MHz beyond stock speeds. Meanwhile, the board’s memory operates at an even 800MHz, also 25MHz over stock. This makes Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX the first X1900 XTX card to be overclocked from the factory, up to now board manufacturers have been sticking to ATI’s stock clock speeds. By default this gives Sapphire’s Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX board the unique distinction of being the fastest X1900 XTX card on the market right now.

Software and accessories

Rather than bundling their latest graphics cards with an assortment of games and game demos (like most manufacturers do), Sapphire has recently instituted their Sapphire Select game bundle program. Included inside the packaging of the Blizzard Radeon X1900 XTX is a Sapphire Select DVD. On the Sapphire Select DVD you’ll find four games: Tony Hawk’s Undergound 2, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, and Richard Burns Rally. You can try all four games for up to one hour, at that point you’ll then pick two games to be unlocked for the full version. The other two games can then be purchased at a discount if you’d like.

In addition to the Sapphire Select DVD, Sapphire also includes a copy of CyberLink PowerDVD 6 2-channel edition, and PowerDirector 4DE. Hardware accessories included with the card are a 6-pin PCI-E power connector, two DVI adapters, S-Video and composite video cables, a component video cable, and VIVO cable.