Water cooling

To cool our sample we used an Ybris K7, verifying the perfect compatibility with the card and the perfect contact guaranteed by the fixing system with four springs.

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In the entire test we leaved the whole card without auxiliary coolers without having warning temperatures, but we advice to provide also to cool the memories.

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To test the card we prepared two separated platforms:
For the first part of the test we used an Asus Striker Extreme as motherboard with Windows XP operative system.

The second platform was made using the DFI P965 Dark with Windows Vista as operating system.

We choose to make two series of tests using both the systems available, because, as we will see, there are great differences in bechnhmarks.
This will highlight the state of current driver video, and we will see that there is a lot of work to do on the Windows Vista drivers. The time required to install drivers is exaggerate: they will install also about 600MB of programs, so be patient.

Seen the characteristics of the Radeon HD 2900XT we choose to compare it with its direct Nvidia rival: the 8800GTS 640MB.
There will be a short LN2 session, to see how this new ATI chip behave in extremely cold conditions.