Abit Radeon 9800XT water-cooled to 505MHz

I TRIED TO overclock the Power Color Radeon 9800XT few weeks back and as you can see here, we got some nice scores when this card was pushed to 450MHz. The original overclock from 9800PRO to 9800XT was only 38MHz. that was what users got when they upgraded from Radeon 9800 PRO, card that runs at 380MHz to a 412MHz Radeon 9800XT so the 450MHz card was the XT PRO. This time we were able to create an 9800XT SUPER PRO.

The Asetek guys got the idea to watercool an Abit Radeon 9800XT card and we gladly accepted the challenge as we wanted to see what this baby could do. The graphics card water block was placed at the GPU and of course we had to remove the Radeon original cooler that was covering the front of the RAM modules as well.

We learned soon that RAM speed is the real limitation of this card and we could not do more then 380MHz/760MHz - effectively only 60MHz from the original Radeon 9800XT's specified speed. We also learned that memory doesn't have to be actively cooled as we saw no difference while cooling memory or not.

As for the core, we learned soon that the card could be easily pushed to astonishing 500 MHz and even beyond that for a little.

We ended up to close to a 100MHz overclock with its old R360 core that is actually built with 0.15µ (micron) aarchitecture that should be more then old, warm and non overclockable. Still we managed to have it stable to 505MHz and manage to keep it stable for over 72 hours while we were testing heavily overclocked CPUs.

We did this with the Asetek WaterChill VGA block that is part of the computer water cooling kit that separately costs around €50 I guess. To make this overclock even more remarkable we were able to get a Prescott to 3.85GHz and Radeon 9800XT at 505MHz core 760MHz memory at the same time. The chipset was also cooled with a chipset watercooler and 875 PRO had something to offer.

It's a double win for Abit - the new born ATI partner since we did this CPU and VGA overclock in its Max 3 motherboard powered with not so quiet OTES cooling solution. Still, the board showed some heavy overclocking potential since it's not easy to get new CPUs close to 4 GHz.

We got some seriously interesting scores that you can see here. Still - being in a rush -- we forgot to compare non overclocked card to non overclocked. We only used one result from our Power Color Radeon 9800XT review that is pure graphically dependent since we tested two cards on completely different platforms and you can see the difference.

We used :

WaterChill VGA, CPU and Chipset cooler
Prescott 3.2 GHz at 3.85 GHz
2x512 MB DDR 550 Corsair PC4400 memory or Kingstone HyperX DDR500 memory depending of the test
Abit Max 3 875 PRO board
Maxtor S ATA Drive
WaterChill to cool VGA and Chipset and CPU

With water you can definitely push Radeon 9800XT to new horizons. At 505MHz this core gave us 394 FPS at 1024x768 in Quake 3 and 6950 as 3Dmark03 scores and it was stable for days. We have to admit that water-cooling from Asetek did impress us since it was able to cool down Prescott, well known for its default 103W heat dissipation and close to 150W where we drove it. The Radeon 9800XT that also had to generate some heat and the Intel chipset at the same time.

Quake 3	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	394.1	306.2	241.8
3Dmark 2001SE Nature	Nature	1024x768
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	129.0	20453
UT 2003 FLY	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	276.9	219,6	158
UT 2003 BOT	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	91.7	91	85.8
Aquamark 3			1024x768
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz			20937
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	3Dmark03	game 2	Game 3	Nature
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	6950	49.2	42.5	39.5
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	Single Texturing	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel sharer 2.0
Abit Waterchill Radeon 9800XT 500 / 780 MHz	2008.8	3225.6	22.1	58
Power Color Radeon 9800XT 450 / 780 MHz	1979.7	3077.8	21.7	56.5

For graphics overclockers, the water solution is definitely something that should look at. Almost 100MHz in graphics world or should we say close to 20 per cent overclock is definitely not something that you see every day. Using air cooling methods, I was able to push same cards to 450MHz but not to 505MHz milestone value. The good thing is that WaterChill will cool all your parts -- CPU, chipset and your graphics card but it will cost you around €200 Euros or even more for complete package. If you're into overclocking, soundless computing and pushing the limits of graphics solutions this is the kit for you. It would sure help you be the fastest graphic kid on the block.

This is the first card of this kind made by Asetek and pushed by the INQUIRER, but who knows. Maybe some ATI partners will recognise this work and steal our idea for their retail products.

I guess this is the fastest Radeon 9800XT that we know of, apart from phase changed cool ones. µ