The Card:

Graphics card cooling has been a hugely discussed topic over the last year. Whilst ATI continued down a more familiar route, sticking to single slot solutions Nvidia moved onto two slot cooling solutions for the Geforce FX 5800 and 5900 series cards. The first thing that strikes you about the 9800 XT is the large copper heatsink and fan, as the core speed of the Radeon 9800XT is reasonably high for a 0.15 micron part more cooling is required than the 9800 Pro. Despite the size of the fan it is no louder than the 9800 Pro solution. The 9800 XT also features hardware monitoring and is able to adjust the speed of the fan in accordance with the temperature of the core. When switching up in speed the change in noise is almost unnoticeable. Had the PC case not been on the desk and the side open we would never have known there had been a change in speed!

As well as being a very quiet cooler the 9800 XT heatsink and fan are also very thin, keeping in with the single slot philosophy of the 9800 Pro. Here is an image looking at the bottom of the card (agp slot side) when the card is laid flat on a surface.

A huge benefit of the 9800 XT board over the Pro board is the change in size. The 9800 pro 256mb was slightly smaller than the Geforce FX 256mb, the XT reduces in size even further – despite retaining the 256mb of ram.

The remaining new feature on the ATI Radeon 9800 XT is the large copper heatsink on the back of the card which dissipates heat from the core and the ram.

 

Installation:
Installation of the card was extremely easy. Due to the reduction of size the card and the single slot cooling there were no concerns with other components interfering with the XT.
A large amount of space between the IDE, DIMM clips, rear of the Hard Drive and the XT.

How the card sits in the AGP slot and surrounding area.

The installation of the drivers was equally trouble free, something we have come to expect from ATI. The catalysts supplied for the review were fully WHQL’ed for the 9800 XT a novelty for such a new review sample!

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