ATI emulates NASA effect

IN MY long career as a reviewer, I can freely say I've seen almost everything: from a brand new system for review with a real spider's nest, to the use of duct tape to "enhance the stability of the cooling solution on a motherboard". Manufacturer's Pentium 4 reference board embarrassment spared.

But today's matter is a bit different. We have acquired a CrossFire kit and just after yours truly started to test this baby, something weird fell on a motherboard. I didn't get it at first, but when I wanted to add a second graphics card, I saw a piece of white foam lying just beneath the first PCIe slot and another, smaller piece on the slot itself - both of which were not present on the motherboard when I received it.

When I looked closely at CrossFire Edition card, I noticed a large amount of white foam placed between the cooler and the Composting Engine chip. After that, the Jekyll or the Hyde awoke in me and I started to dismantle the cooling rig. What I saw can only be described as a patchwork.

The foam was covering not only the Xilinx's chip, but rather spread to the left and down side around the chip, with a second chip and couple of resistors being completely covered in the foam, which obviously started to loose grip and change its position to the lower regions of the CrossFire graphics card. It is obvious that the foam was used instead of the classical thermal pads that were perhaps too thick to work on the Composting Engine chip.

What is even odder is the fact that back on an ATI sponsored boat near Belgrade, the CrossFire Edition graphic card did not had that foam, as far as I can recall.

Will CrossFire launch suffer a NASA-style "foam issue", or is this just an isolated case? Colleague reviewers will probably know it, but using foam as a thermal insulator is at best a little weird.

In ATI's defence - reviewer's boards are usually used in a test-bed configuration with the mother placed horizontally and graphic card is in vertical position and future buyers of CrossFire will hopefully have enough money to buy a case as well.

We do not believe that this problem would arouse if the board had been deployed in a normal, horizontal position.

Since X850XT CrossFire Edition is a shrouded lemon anyway, we hope that CrossFire editions of R5xx generation - the X1800XT and X1600XT - certainly won't feature such an "innovative" way of cooling.

To set the record straight, I checked with the guys from the chemistry lab at near-by university, and one of the theories was that since the foam is created by chemical induction, it is possible that ATI had just put "too fresh" compound and exposed it to excessive heating and cooling, generated by a near-by GPU and transport. P.S. We know that insiders and old ATI veterans just cannot bear the fact that their beloved F.K.A.A.T.I. ("Formerly Known As Array Technologies Incorporated") changed the logo on September 30th, 2003 (the Radeon 9800XT launch with Half-Life 2 going MIA) - but just how much millions of those old-logo stickers does ATi have left? You see, we reviewers are seeing those logos on almost every ATI reference product even today and personally I like the old logo better. But, the story hasn't changed much on retail products either. I received two X800GTO boards on Friday and they sport the same sticker as well. µ