At the beginning of the month we brought you a review of Sapphire's X1600XT Ultimate Edition. We got our hands on it early for you, and since then Sapphire have improved its cooling further.
For those of you that can't be bothered to read the review (shame on you) the Ultimate Edition of the X1600XT features a heatpiped cooler, with a fan around the back of the card, which removes air in a quieter fashion than a reference cooler. Still, we'd have preferred to see no fan at all...
It's a shame that Sapphire has not been able to engineer a completely passively-cooled card. Had that been the case, we'd be inclined to look upon it even more favourably.
They've got closer to fanless, by updating the BIOS that'll ship with these cards to support thermal control of the fan. So, there's now a fan speed table in the BIOS, that controls the fan's speed based on GPU temperature. According to Sapphire, at 29% speed the fan is "almost totally silent". Great news.
Now, drag your mouse over to the review, dammit!
