You see, the clever bods at Microsoft decided to make DirectX 10 a Vista exclusive feature and thus if you want to experience some of the marvels of DirectX 10, you’ve got to buy a copy of Vista too. To most, the cost of Vista is something they hadn’t really taken into account when they’re planning on upgrading to play some of the soon-to-be-released DirectX 10 games in all their glory. We are going to see the old version of the ATI radeon, before ATI became famous with the HD3000 series with the flagship 3870X2 is the more elusive and crazy concept of the passive cooling solution even if it is in the older 1900 series.
In fact, it’s not until partners have had hardware in their hands for quite some time before we really start to the fruits of them thinking outside of the box. At this point, we start to see products that really differentiate themselves from the rest of the field. This is, arguably, where retail graphics cards actually get a bit more interesting, because the board partners have the chance of catching the eyes of end users that would naturally move right away from the reference cooling design due to it being overly noisy, or a little inadequate. At a first glance, the fins on Power Color’s Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3 heat sink look a bit like some kind of grill when they’re laid down flat. Maybe there’s room for a bit of a fire under the heat sink fins, making it ideal for flame grilling your meat. Despite this being the case, we sadly didn’t get the chance to test Power Color’s Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3 as a barbeque. Being the bunch of geeks that we are, we didn’t have any streaks of bacon in the office fridge while we were testing. Hopefully, next time, we’ll remember to pop to the supermarket on the way to work.
To round up the GPU’s other notable features, RV570 also supports ATI’s Crossfire technology natively via the internal Crossfire connectors (we’ll come back to this again shortly) and also uses ATI’s 512-bit internal Ring Bus memory controller. Although it’s a 512-bit internal memory interface, it’s still a 256-bit connection to the 256MB of local GDDR3 memory. While on the subject of memory, the 256MB of on-board memory is clocked at 685/1370MHz – that’s 5MHz lower than ATI’s reference frequency of 690MHz (1380MHz DDR).
Because Power Color has opted to move away from the reference cooler, despite keeping the same PCB design, the cooling engineers have had to design a small black heat sink to cover the PWMs. Thankfully, the heat sink fits right under the Accelero S2 and you’ll never really notice it’s there. To finish up on the cooling front, Power Color has opted to cool the eight DRAM chips with individual BGA memory heat sinks made from aluminum.
For the performance graphics is obviously going to be an obsolete look for most people, only as low as 5fsp in Crysis in even at medium frame rate unplayable for most people nowadays but great to look back at the concepts of crazy forms of cooling passively, and we did it is ordinary fashion. But you would even buy this anymore, obviously the HD4000 looks a treat but for we can look back to say that it was a crazy year back in 2007.
