Video Card Thread (Mostly Gecube x1950xt)

Do you guys know how well the X1900 GT overclocks?

 

Thanks for that MaccerM, your temps are lower than mine, unsurprisingly, I can pull up to about 70C on my card if it's been running on load for an hour and the PC has been on for several hours previously. However, all my case fans are running at less than 800rpm, and I am only using four.

I'm not surprised, the extra heat chucked out by that thing will spread to the components around it, and moreso to ones near it, such as the Graphics PCB, I wouldn't be too surprised if you can overclock memory further with the HR-03 simply because it isn't being toasted by the very device cooling it.
Agreed on the power draw, it's not huge (I only have such a high power draw as my overclock doubles the thermal output of my CPU), you'll never get near 500W no matter what. Thtat, however, is not my reason for recommending you change the power supply. Cheap units marked up to 650W can go even at only 150W, with potentially catastrophic consequences, it's incredibly foolish to even contemplate keeping one on the grounds of 'it might not happen'.
Case in point, the Thermaltake 500W PSU is better than the Allied, and it can't handle it. What does that prove?
MaccerM, if you scan through some of the earlier pages in this thread, when harvardguy first appeared, the peltier cooler was redeemed somewhat, but nonetheless the HR-03 will stamp all over it in terms of noise, power consumption, heat output, cooling capability and even reliability.

Abuzar: I don't, but given it's position in the range, (it's the little brother to my card} I think it has the potential to do rather well. Try it and see. Don't go mad on the core, and you should get a storming memory overclock.

 

Sam, re your last comment perhaps you may be able to enlighten on this one. What is the relationship between performance fps, gpu clock speed and memory clock speed. I had always thought the best way was to try and increase the two in ratio, working on the assumption that the setup to start with is balanced up well. Are you hinting that a higher memory o/c vs gpu o/c is more productive in terms of performance?

 

Not entirely, you want higher both for better performance, but from what I've seen, if you don't overclock your core as far as you possibly can, you get far more of an overclock available to you on the memory. Consequently, you're better off.
Suppose you start with a 500mhz Core and 1000mhz memory speed. If the highest you could overclock the core was 600, setting it to that might mean you can get 1100 on the memory. But if you set the core to, say 575, the memory might go as far as 1250. The 575/1250 combination would earn better frame rates than the 600/1100 combination.

This isn't the case for all cards, but has certainly been the case often.

 

A final note on harvardguy's psu problem. Sam's right. I had a quick look on the net and found this;

http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=ALB500E

which I'm assuming is your psu? If you look at the specs on the bottom of the page it rates the 12v output as 20A. Although I'm confident my old Tr2-500 would run my sys now, that puts out 28A on the 12v. I think at 20A, (if you assume the pelt uses say 1/2 the total power draw of the card) even without the pelt, once you add in some other components and you are going to need more juice. Gecube = new psu.

 

Indeed. Put it this way, my card uses around 130W full load, if we add 60-70 for the peltier thats a round 200. Very few CPUs use less than 70W from the 12V rail, so that makes a good 270W, ignoring anything else on the 12V line (fans, hard drives etc). The Allied can produce 240W on that line. The Thermaltake PSU could put out 336W and even that wasn't enough. By that conclusion, since the peltier uses less than 96W, even if it was removed, your PSU would still be inadequate.

 

MaccerM and Sammorris

Thanks for that analysis guys. So, either way, I've got to get the new PSU, with or without the pelt.

You know, Travis (kardson) is running the gecube WITH the pelt - seems like he's the only one. And he is getting 70 C gpu temps. I bought a bunch of sinks for the memory chips, and Ray said they would fit under the tec. Now I can see that your HR-03 performance of average 57 or so beats the hell out of the pelt. Thermalright apparently is really the king of pipe cooling. They have awesome coolers.

So maybe since we all agree I don't have any choice - like you said MaccerM, gecube = new psu, then that's what I'll do first. I'll get the $75 OCZ 600 watt that Sam recommended with four 12 volt rails and I think something like 40-45 maximum amps overall on the 12 volts - plenty of headroom to run even the pelt. That way I'll test out the gecube card and do the mods if it is buggy, or RMA it or whatever. I remember, MaccerM, that one of the best mods comes from you - about the four adjustable peltier bolts bottoming out on the post. Anyway, thanks to this forum, I'll get it working with the Pelt.

Heat-wise, I now have plenty of fans and my case is really well-ventilated. I added a huge Kama Bay front intake fan (scythe 120mm 1600 rpm), and the other inlet is the hsf intake fan ducted to outside - I think it's a 92mm - pretty strong fan (gecube heat won't affect cpu cooling because of the sunbeam duct.)

For exhaust, I will have the new 120mm OCZ psu exhaust fan, plus side cover exhaust (scythe 120mm at 800 rpm) back exhaust (80mm at probably 2400 rpm, draws .25 amps and blows hard) plus blitztorm pci card with fan blowing up at video card, and adjustable turbine blowing out the back. So counting psu, that's four exhausts. I have modded this thing out and I'm getting major air flow. So I'll throw the hot little gecube monster into the mix, and exhaust all that air in a jiffy. I don't have the kind of silenced PC that Sam would be proud of, but I wear headphones.

Now, later on, will I break down and get the HR-03? Maybe. It really looks nice, and in comparison I can see why you guys don't like the pelt.

(By the way, the anandtech review of the Thermalright 120 ultra extreme with 6 pipes talked about one other cooler that used a pelt, something called the monsoon ii lite, which was the only one that matched, or maybe even beat, the extreme in maximum amount of cpu overclocking. The mobo monitor they used showed lower temps from the extreme, but the fact that the overclocking went a little further, 3.96 versus 3.94 I think, had to mean that the actual cpu temp was lower, didn't it? no matter what the mobo monitor said? Anyway, one thing we know. A pelt can cool below ambient, but pipes can't, right? The pipe liquid flashes, and takes away the heat hundreds of times faster than solid copper, but it can't create a negative thermal differential like a pelt can, right? So what am I saying? I don't know. What if Thermalright added a pelt to the HR-03 - maybe you'd be at 53 C MaccerM, down from 57, but you'd just have a little more case heat to get rid of. Something to think about - I guess I'm still standing up for the pelt a little bit. I just like the pelt concept, for some reason, cooling with no moving parts, despite its inefficiency, and I am still convinced that, done right, the pelt has its PC cooling uses. Maybe somebody like Thermalright will take their outstanding pipe know-how, add a little pelt to the mix, and find the optimum solution to world peace.

Well, winter is coming, and the room that I'll be gaming in is a sunroom with windows all over, which gets cold. (Not very cold, it's SoCal.) So all the gecube heat won't be a problem for now. Come next summer? Yeah, maybe I'll do the HR-03 - but by then maybe I'll do like Waymon and just get a new PCI-express computer and chuck the P4 and join all you core 2 duo guys. Maybe by then I'll even get close to the 7000 3dmark like Sam - rich

 

Um, Cooling with no moving parts? What are those two stinking great fans on the Gecube then? There are no moving parts at all in my HR-03, because I don't even use a fan on it. Note that I use the Thermalright Ultra 120 heatsink on my CPU now as well (not the extreme) and my CPU temps have gone from 54C load at 70% fan speed, down to 43C load at 45% fan speed. This is compared to a Freezer 7 Pro cooler as well, not the stock cooler.

 

Well i'm glad we worked it out, and you didn't cook your pc! To be honest, it sounds like with all that airflow you'll be fine with the pelt. It does work, sort-of. (It just caused me alot of grief, grrr!) If you do have to take the cooler off to tighten pressure on the gpu, further to the tape mod I suggested I would just use the little paper computer washers you can buy and forget any type of tape. Here you can get a pack of 50 from ebuyer for about £1.25, pence (or cents) really! The tape does work but it will compress over time and this will probably be sped up when it heats up too, making it slack back off again.

Back to the TECs themselves as pc cooling kit, I'm sure that if done right it could be quite an effective inefficient cooler. I think currently though they must just get saturated with heat as the part that is supposed to cool the TEC can't cut it. You have a chip on one side that is 70c, and a cooling solution on the other side that is 75c as the TEC's in the middle throwing a load of extra heat in. Maybe if both sides of the MACS cooler (heatpipes and radiators) they put on the Gecube cooled the TEC then the gpu might actually benefit from the cooling action? Who knows. The only way I can see it working is if you can get a solution that can effectively remove heat from the hot side of the TEC (and get rid of it somewhere away from the rest of the pc). If you could take the hot side down to 40c then you could probably get the other side down to ambient and below.

But hold on surely that super solution to cool down a hot something already exists? Infact loads do, Thermaltake, Thermalright, Zalman, Skythe all make pretty good ones and the reason they're good is no idiot has come along and put a thing that generates 100w of heat in the middle of them!

I just really can't see it, why TECs? More power, more heat - surely nowadays with energy crises and global warming we are looking of ways to increase efficiency and decrease consumption, that's why I don't think you'll ever see a successful mainsteam TEC PC cooling solution, and also because the whole cooling result is always going to be hotter than a non-TEC one.

 

Ah yes, good old ebuyer. Scan have seen a lot of my business lately seeing as how they're very cheap. On the TECs, I have to say I agree. While they may work, they're the most inefficient way of cooling PC parts I've ever seen.

 

You guys make a lot of sense.

When I said "no moving parts" that was a good point, Sam. Two major fans to try to move out all that heat that MaccerM is talking about. Sure, no moving parts, but then an entire cooling solutions with several moving parts to deal with the extra heat. Hehe.

Well, in answer to your question, MaccerM, why a Tec, I guess my only point still is the "below-ambient" temps that the tec can deliver. Below ambient. How far below ambient can we go, for the cpu for example, at what cost in terms of additional heat in the case, for what overclocking headroom gain?

Thermaltake sinks, Thermalright Hr-03, water cooling like Waymon has, all are excellent cooling solutions. But the VERY best you can achieve is ambient, not one fraction of a degree lower.

So if case temp is, say, what 50?, let's see that's 50 x 9/5 plus 32 = 122 degrees F (well maybe a really-well ventilated case - like mine - is even cooler then that's your bottom limit of achievable cpu cooling - the case temperature - 50 C.

So let me propose this imaginary conversation in the Thermalright engineering department in the Taiwan corporate offices. I have translated from the Chinese.

"Guys, we have been looking at the monsoon ii lite, which actually slightly beat us on the Anandtech cpu cooler review - only however in terms of maximum overclock, 3.96 Ghz to our 3.94. They use a peltier cooler silicon array. We don't like being beaten by anybody, anywhere, anytime."

"In the last couple of months, some of us here in Engineering, particularly Chang, have done quite a bit of research on this, and we have figured out that the best cost-effective tec we can get for cpu cooling on core 2 duo, with full 6-pipe HR-03 type cooling with fan on the hot tec side, will drop the cpu to 10 C below ambient, in typical 40-55 case temp scenarios, for ultimate supremacy in overclocking. At that point, the only solutions that could beat us would of course be chilled water or other A/C or cryogenics solutions that, by comparison, won't appeal to a lot of people because of significant price differential, and also because of dew point concerns, ie possible condensation and water contamination of sensitive electronics.

"At a reasonable retail price of only $25 or so above our standard cooler, without any dew point concern, driving cpu temp to 10 c below ambient, our engineering team headed by Chang has calculated that this tec will pull 80 watts, at 50% efficiency, (which means we'll be putting 40 watts of extra heat into everybody's case, besides the 40 watts of actual heat we'll be pulling off the cpu.) As I said, the cost of the peltier cooler and controller will push our retail price $25 additional, without the fan. For marketing, to keep prices down, we will let the enthusiast supply his/her own 92mm fan, as we do now. The difference will be that the fan will be a requirement, not an option."

"We believe there is a market for this product. We think many of the enthusiastic overclocking gamers will pay the price, and put up with the additional 80 watts total extra case heat, and the roughly 2 cents per hour additional electricity cost. We have a working prototype that we're putting out for limited alpha test."

So that's my hypothetical meeting at Thermalright, Inc. The question is, Sam and MaccerM and everybody else - if such a product existed, would you consider buying it? I think I would, depending on how it reviewed, and how the newegg feedback went. -rich

 

PS It looks like Newegg just discontinued the Gecube with pelt cooler. They feature an x1950 pro agp with pelt-less cooler. (Chang's Taiwan counterpart over at Gecube has been executed. So much for there being a market for a pelt

 

But the x1950xt is better than the pro, so we got the better version

Just the stock cooling sucks...

 

You're right Ray. Newegg doesn't carry it. I wonder if Gecube will release it again with a different cooler.

I only found it at one place on the web for $270 - still around at some places for $360, or $440! Gecube lists newegg and tiger direct as their two US distributors, but both have dropped the card. (I guess these others with their outrageous prices have to build enough profit in to pay for all the RMAs.)

I imagine heads are rolling over at the GEcube tec department. How to release innovative technology (the tec) but botch up the factory install so badly you damage your rep with your most important US distributor (newegg.)

 

Why cant they just take the cooler from one of their other x1950xts like the PCI-e version and put it on the AGP version. Or make a powercooler like the one that the 2900XT has and put it on the x1950xt...

 

Harv - Definitely not! Wouldn't touch one of those things even it it could be proven to perform marginally better than a TEC-less solution. It would probably cook the northbridge the psu or something else in the process! As far as running below ambient temperaure, I don't think there is a TEC capable of cooling a stock speed cpu under full load down below ambient temperaure is there? (Please correct me if I'm wrong but going on the performance of the one I had loosely attached to my gfx card...)
Enough bashing! Moving on - In the review that you talk about with the monsoon cooler, it is interesting that the monsoon didn't actually beat the TT cooler in thermal performance. Perhaps the airflow coming out of the monsoon more effectively cooled the motherboard components, or not? But it would suggest that the temp of the cpu itself didn't play the part in those final few mhz.
And that follows through really, not all that surprisingly because cpu's are designed to work in heat. The old P4s were thermally spec'ed up to 75c, you could re-heat your cuppa on that - and I think the C2Ds are 65c? That means they are expected to get hot, and expected to perform to their best within the 25-50c range. Surely then there would be no vast benefit to running one of these units at 20c because it is in their design spec to run significantly hotter? (At this point I'm just spit-balling but I'm sure I have read reviews other than the one you mention where the final % overclock was not tied to temperature, so long as the temp wasn't within the top 20% of the thermal spec.) It becomes a physical limitation of the component design. So... even if it is possible to achieve the same overclock at 50c with no TEC and 40c with a TEC I'd definitely be sticking with my TEC-less thanks very much!

 

The layout of the AGP version is different to the PCIE so you couldn't just bolt a PCIE cooler straight on, I think thats why they opted for the MACS TEC cooler because it's quite generic, four mounting posts and far away enough from the body of the card so as not to touch/obstruct any other components.

 

Sorry guys, double post! AD server said it was down for maintainance!

Harv - Definitely not! ...

 

Harvrdguy: I wouldn't buy such a product, no. I am 100% confident in Thermalright's enginneering that it would be good, but I simply cannot afford any extra heat going into my case, or I wouldn't be able to get away with my silent fan setup, things would just get too hot.

Waymon: That's what I thought, the stock cooler is a bit noisy but it gets the job done, and for a single-figure wattage!
MaccerM: Oh come now, the stock cooler isn't that bad, if it were, you'd see more cards fail, I don't see a particularly high RMA rate for cards that use the 'leaf blower' cooler.

 

Hey I just ran 3DMark06 and I got 5379. Is that good?