As you already are aware, highend videocards generate a lot of heat, hence the huge cooler on the RX850XT-TD256E. The copper heatsink comes in direct contact with the X850 XT core while heat is drawn away from the memory on the front of the videocard via the large aluminum heatspreader.

On the back, the memory is cooled by a smaller aluminum heatspreader. The cooler mounts onto the videocard via six mount points, two around the GPU and the remaining four placed evenly around the card.

The shapely 65mm squirrel cage fan acts as an exhaust and expels hot air from the case via the adjacent PCI slot. This makes sense, since you wouldn't want that warm air circulating inside the system. The fan is temperature controlled and during PC startup it spins at 100% speed, making quite a racket.

After about three seconds it slows to normal operating speed though. We did not notice an increase in noise level during testing, even with the card overclocked - so this is not really an ideal low-noise videocard.

If you're paranoid about temperatures, the MSI RX850XT-TD256E does have an integrated thermal probe on die. Programs like RivaTuner can read and log idle/load temperatures, which is more useful than ATi's driver core temperature reader.

Overclocking the RX850XT-TD256E

Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 520MHz 582MHz Memory Speed: 1080MHz 1215MHz If you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

The first thing we did was raise both core and memory to X850 XT PE speeds and we were glad to see that the RX850XT-TD256E had absolutely no problem doing this. That should save you a couple of hundred dollars for starters. :-)

Next up was the memory. Starting at X850 XT PE speeds, I first topped up the memory to an even 1200 MHz. We didn't get much farther than that with the memory sadly, since anything higher than 1215 MHz caused the videocard to start showing snow in 3D and 2D modes.

Considering that the RX850XT-TD256E is clocked at 520/1080 by default, its a pretty decent overclocker.

PCStats Test System Specs:

processor: amd athlon64 4000+ clock speed: 12 x 200 mhz = 2.4 ghz motherboards: dfi lanparty nf4 sli-dr (nf4-sli) videocard: msi rx800xt-vtd256e ati radeon x800 xl gigabyte gv-rx80l256v powercolor x700 pro powercolor bravo x700 msi nx6800gt-t2d256e msi nx6800-td128e (single msi nx6800-td128e (sli mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (single mode) gigabyte gv-3d1 (sli mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (single mode) msi nx6600gt-td128e (sli mode) albatron trinity pc6600 asus extreme n6600top/td/128m/a msi rx850xt-td256e memory: 2x 512mb mushkin pc3200 l2 v2 hard drive: 74gb wd raptor 10k rpm sata hdd cdrom: aopen 52x combo powersupply: seasonic super tornado 400w software setup windowsxp build 2600 nforce catalyst 4.12 detonator 66.93 benchmarks 3dmark2001se 3dmark05 codecreatures aquamark gun metal 2 x2 the threat ut2003 doom3 aa test, af and aa+af test 3dmark2001se ut2003

the agp and pci-e systems use a different motherboard but results are shown for reference. unfortunately there are no aquamark3 numbers for this review, we could not get the benchmark working.