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| XGI/Club3d Volari Duo V8 256mb | ||
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Review: Stuart
"Veridian3"
Davidson
I’ve long been a supporter of new technology rather than a “wait and see if it catches on” person. If nothing else new technology is fun to play with. Occasionally you get something special…like the Athlon 64 line. And sometimes you get your fingers burned (Nintendo Virtual Boy anyone?). A couple of months ago we were lucky enough to be assured a sample of the Volari V8 Duo and it was with great excitement we opened our club 3d package earlier this month. Read on to find out how the card performs. The Card By now you’ll all know that the V8 Duo is a dual core (each core at 350mhz) graphics card and that it features 16 pixel pipelines (8 per core) and 256mb of 450mhz ddr2 so we won’t dwell too much on the technical aspect here. If you want exact specifications you can read about them in the section/table below.
From an aesthetic perspective the V8 Duo is a beast of a card, it’s as long as Nvidia’s 5950U and features a large amount of cooling. On the front of the card has a large copper heat sink which houses 2 fans (each with blue led). The rear of the card is almost entirely covered by a large copper heatsink. Additionally there are several components on the front and back which are cooled by thick ramsinks. Seated at the rear of the card are the 2 molex sockets. The Volari requires a great deal of power and so you’ll need 2 free molex plugs and at least a 400w PSU. The thought of 2 molex plugs and a 400w PSU might make you baulk, it certainly wasn’t a selling point for us however in the great scheme of things its not that big a deal…this is not the case however for the weight and volume of the card. Firstly the weight… the V8 Duo is possibly the heaviest component that I have ever installed in a system. We raised the weight of the 5900ultra as a concern back when we tested Gainwards version and at that time we saw it as a negative, the Volari is most defiantly heavier than that. The amount of stress on my AGP port can’t be a good thing and the fact that the Volari is a single slot solution means the card is only held in the case by 1 screw (rather than the geforces 2). Secondly the noise the cooling solution makes is actually louder than the FX flow, possibly on par with the FX flow on the 5800 Ultra. The down side of the Volari is that the noise is constant where as the Nvidia solution was only loud in 3d mode. We have recorded 2 sound files which are available for download. The first is the test system being cooled by the stock Intel HSF, AI7 northbridge and 30db case fan with a Radeon 9000 graphics card. The second is the same system with the Volari added. The difference is quite staggering. (The microphone was held 8 inches from the cards whilst recording). Download Audio Files
Our final cause for concern with
the card itself was the placement of the molex socket. Both sockets
point out of the rear of the card parallel to the card rather than
at a right angle. This causes an issue with space between the power
connectors and the rear of the systems hard drive.
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Radeon
