Review: Gainward CoolFX Powerpack! Ultra/2600 - Graphics - HEXUS.net

Overclocking, Noise and Temperature

Overclocking

With an officially supported clock of 470/1200, the potential for even more overclocking initially seemed high. Board manufacturers and the original GPU designer often set clocks to meet OEM heat and space requirements, so overclocking is usually pretty good on most retail examples, depending on the GPU.

With water-cooling for the GPU, that overclocking headroom should be decent. It was therefore a slight disappointment to see the CoolFX Powerpack! Ultra/2600 stop at a benchmarkable 475/1250. While the card would go a fair bit higher in some tests, 492/1302 for 3DMark2001SE for example, 475/1250 was the only clock speed that would run everything.

Those clocks translate to 7600Mpixels/sec of pixel fillrate, the same figure in texel fillrate and a faintly mad 40GB/sec of GPU to memory bandwidth. That returns a 3DMark03 score of 13609 using Model 3400+ Athlon 64 and the high side of 14000 on a 2.8GHz FX-51.

As always, while you'll get 470/1200 from your CoolFX Powerpack! Ultra/2600, anything more isn't guaranteed and you should only take my results as a general guideline at best.

Noise

What noise? I mentioned before that the Papst fan appeared to be punching well below its quoted dBA weight. I struggled to hear the fan at all during testing, from roughly six feet away at just below head height. With the pump alarmingly quiet and no other moving parts employed, the CoolFX Powerpack! Ultra/2600 is very close to silent. It can't quite match a recently tested Zalman Reserator 1 in terms of noise, or lack of it, but it's pretty close. The fan choice is inspired.

Temperatures

Compared to another air-cooled retail 6800 Ultra I have in for review (it uses the reference cooler), the CoolFX is at least 10°C cooler than the air-cooled card at stock clocks and over 15°C cooler under load, at maximum clocks.