SUMMARY: Our second review today is of PowerColor's brand new Radeon X800GT EVO graphics card which comes with factory out-of-the-box watercooling. The watercooling unit is actually the ThermalTake Tide Water cooling solution and its clear PowerColor is making moves to get into the hearts of enthusiasts but have they succeeded? Read on for our thoughts on the new graphics card.
The PowerColor X800GT EVO utilizes the ThermalTake Tide Water liquid cooling solution. The Tide Water solution is an all-in-one package that gives you water cooling with ease.
Within the package there are four main components - the copper radiator, the fan, the little pump and the reservoir. The card comes with pretty standard coolant in it which makes it even easier again to install since you don’t have to worry about doing this task.
The fan in the center of the card helps cool the copper radiator and can be adjusted to two different RPM speeds – high and low. When running at high, the fan spins at 3000 RPM which is loud and the other being 1700 RPM which is a lot more peaceful.
Installation
Thanks to the card coming with liquid already in it and pipes already connected as they should be, the installation is just as easy as installing your normal graphics card. Once you install the card into your PCI Express slot, you have to find two spare PCI slots to install the Tide Water. This is a disadvantage as it takes up two of your PCI slot bays where you could have installed other PCI devices.
A power connector comes out the back of the cooler which powers both the fan and pump and with that plugged in, we are ready to go. While it doesn’t look like it is doing much when it comes on the best way to make sure the water is flowing is to just check the heatsink with your hand after a few minutes of power as even in Windows if the GPU isn’t getting cooled it will heat up and become untouchable.
Unfortunately it seems like the card doesn’t have any temperature monitoring so we cannot vouch for PowerColor’s claims of the GPU running at 20 degrees Celsius but it seems fair enough to us. We’ll look into overclocking in a little bit.
