LOSTCIRCUITS

Power and Noise

In contrast to the dust buster-like noiselevel of some earlier high-end nVidia cards, most ATI -powered graphics adapters have been extraordinarily quiet. Likewise, power consumption has remained at somewhat reasonable levels - at least, we have yet to encounter an ATI card with dual power connectors à la GeForce 6800 Ultra. Admittedly, the PCIe versions of all high end cards can resort to the 6-pin power connector feeding no less than 15 A at 12V into the cards which should suffice under all circumstances. On the other hand, despite the fact that Sapphire bundles an adapter for that particular power connector, it is nice to know that in the worst case scenario, there is still a floppy connector present that can be used for the same purpose.

Three cards, three cooling and power solutions: The X300 -based card runs on entirely passive cooling and has no need for auxiliary power. The GeForce 6800GT uses heat pipes to move the heat to the periphery. An interesting feature that will help those without a "PCIe" compliant PSU is the yellow floppy connector next to the PCIe 6-pin power connector on the Sapphire X800XT. is the yellow "floppy" connector that is in reality an analog video port. This type of port is not common in the US, however, a rather standard feature in Europe and the Asian markets and usually connects to an analog video front panel port of the case.

Test Configuration

All three graphics cards were tested in the follwing system configuration:

Hardware

• ASUS P5AD2 Mainboard
• Intel Pentium4 Socket 775LGA 3.4 XE
• 2 x 512 MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-4200 Platinum Enhanced Bandwidth Dual Channel Memory
• Maxtor Maxline III (250 GB SATA 150)
• Pioneer 12X DVD ROM.

Software

• Windows XP Pro
• Service Pack 1a
• ATI Catalyst 8.07 beta (These drivers worked far better than the latest official 4.10 drivers)
• nVidia Forceware 66.77 drivers
• 3DMark2001SE
• 3DMark05
• DOOM 3
• FarCry (Patch 1.3)
• X2 Rolling Demo

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