Mounting the MCW50™ on the ATI X800XT-PE

First job: remove the “old” heatsink; be sure to take your time as you can easily damage a small resistor or something else on the board (destroying an expensive video card in the process).

Lucky for me, ATI makes the job easy as the standard heatsink is attached at the back with 2 screws.

Before slapping on the MCW50 a thin layer of the included thermal paste needs to be spread out evenly over the GPU core, be sure not to put too much as it will deter the heat transfer. The next few steps are straight forward and well described in the instructions manual.



After putting the MCW50™ in place, use the provided screws, nylon screw spacer, spring and nylon retaining washers (to prevent to much pressure on the core) to tighten the block down.



So after only 5 minutes of work I ended up with this :


It already looks “cool” to me :)



Now how does it perform :

I used 3DMark 03 to test stability and ATITool for temp monitoring and overclocking the X800XT-PE, as with CPU’s, lower temps translate into higher overclocks, here are the temperature readings at stock speeds (GPU 520Mhz):



The GPU core temperature never exceeded 38°C while with the original heatsink I noticed +50° temps, so with great expectations, I started to overclock.



I could overclock the core from 520Mhz to 570Mhz stable in benchmarks and games without artifacts; Quite an improvement. (FYI: the “not cooled” memory overclocked from 560 to 600Mhz without issue)

With the CPU at 2800Mhz and X800XT-PE at highest OC I obtained the follow, 3DMark03 score, a system speedy enough to play any current games at very high detail fluently!



Let’s wrap things up ->