HIS IceQ3 compared to Sapphire Toxic

The Hong Kong "Radeon knights" Sapphire and HIS were among the first to get out X1900XTX units with improved coolers, better than the reference ones. Here's the look at the two of their top-notch products in the US$ 450 - 500 class, HIS X1900XTX IceQ 3, and Sapphire X1900XTX Toxic.

While the underlying PCBs and chips are the same, everything else is different: card format, connector back panel, and of couse, cooling system. HIS IceQ 3 uses Arctic Cooling technology to get the best possible out of air cooling, while Sapphire brought compact yet supposedly efficient water cooling to the Toxic card (I guess Toxic refers to the effect of the cooling liquid if drunk - it's not a Martini, even though it may be green).

I was curious to check which of the two would be better when it comes to overclocking the barely-overclockable X1900XTX chip, and put both cards into the same test platform, a 2.8 GHz Athlon FX62 dual-core thingie running the usual WinXP Pro and Catalyst 6.5 with 1 GB Corsair DDR2-800 CL 3-4-3-9 memory on Asus ATI Xpress 3200 board. A Zalman 460W power supply fed the whole ensemble with the necessary juice.

In both cases, GPU cooling is separate now from memory heat sinks, so you could modify or even replace the GPU cooling without affecting the memory heat dissipation. The differences were obvious at first: the Toxic was far less noisy, even at the fan speed setting as "high" - but both of them were less noisy than the ATI reference design, even as you overclock each of them. Both came set at the default 650 MHz GPU, and 1.55 GHz DDR3 throughput - here's how they fared.

IceQ 3 from HIS went up to 704 MHz GPU and 1.62 GHz (801 MHz DDR) memory using Catalyst Overdrive, while Toxic went to 711 MHz GPU and 1.64 GHz (802 MHz DDR) memory in the same setup, but neither completed 3DMark at that level - I had to reduce the GPU clock a bit to get 3DMark05 completed at least. That is not much difference - keep in mind that HIS Iceq 3 Turbo, a more recent addition, supposedly adds about 3% better GPU overclocking, on top of the 700 MHz GPU / 1.6GHz memory default setting.

Also, in practice, you could stretch the Toxic cooling cables a bit and position the liquid cooling card two or three slots further apart in the PC. This helps in case you need to use the immediate next PCI-E slot between the two parts for, say, Physics GPU card (even though Ageia fans will tell you that ATI or Nvidia have no real business there *yet*).

However, keep in mind also that Toxic, being water cooled, is relatively silent - no air cooling, no matter how good, can match a water cooler in the acoustics department.

My verdict: air coolers are getting better, but as superhot R600 and G80 come out later with more heat generation, liquid cooling (water or something more exotic) will be the way to go - for this round, Toxic shows the road directions in the right way. ?