Retail X700 Pro Roundup

Fan Noise and Cooling Solutions

Maintaining a quiet box is important for many people these days. And this time around, we have a really quiet solution to offer. The HIS X700 Pro IceQ is a two-slot card equipped with an Arctic Cooling HSF that has a high and low setting switch outside the case. The noise generated by this fan, on either setting, is incredibly low. The box advertises noise "<=20dB", and even though we don't have the equipment to test that claim in our labs, we could believe the marketing on that. We are testing in a normal lab with normal walls and reflective surfaces. We have also a CPU fan and PSU fan that add a couple dB to the equation. It is likely when they talk about 20dB, they mean in an anechoic chamber at 1 meter. But that's just an educated guess.

The Sapphire and ABIT solutions are audibly different, while the PowerColor card is the loudest that we tested. Generally, the rules of aural perception state that between a 6dB and 10dB increase in SPL translates to a doubling in volume. This means that the PowerColor card is more than twice as loud as HIS's high mode.


Even though ATI builds a thermal diode into every GPU, it is very unfortunate that only the XT series of boards have the sensor built onto them, which can read the diode. The reason for doing this may be to prevent overdrive from being enabled on boards for which it is not meant. Temperature monitoring should be a feature of all boards, and is worth whatever difficulty that ATI may have in regulating overdrive.

We spent time with a thermistor trying to find a spot to measure temperature on these cards. We couldn't get the diode up next to the core between the GPU and the heatsink, and there was no way to get access to the spot on the PCB directly behind the GPU on the HIS card. Everywhere else that we tried to measure gave us readings which didn't make much sense or weren't comparable.

The qualitative analysis of the cooling solutions obviously puts HIS on top. Even though it's quiet, the fan is large and the surface area of the metal is larger. This really is a cool solution. It's difficult to call the next on the list without a temperature gauge. The Sapphire solution looks like it would cool the core better than the PowerColor solution, as it appears to have more surface area via the fans. The fans shroud and speed may help Powercolor (as well as the ABIT) though. Overall, Sapphire has to get an extra point over PowerColor for using ramsinks.

We have seen HIS put thermal sensors on non-XT parts before, and if this is always a vendor decision, we would urge them to add the option. If ATI has control here, please enable all of your partners to include thermal monitoring across the board.