I started of with my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro which is fully volt modded and was quite overclockable on air cooling, here’s a shot of the card running 3DMark2001SE



But air cooling is not what we’re here for today, so I prepared the card for some sub zero cooling, I wrapped it in plastic much like this




Now when I tried to boot nothing happened, I feared the worst and thought the core was cracked (because I removed the protective shim for the installation of the container), after taking off the container I noticed no cracks and the card was dry so I quickly put the stock cooling back on and noticed at that time that one of my assistants (Colin!) had plugged only 3 of the required 4-pin power adapter to the card. DOH!

By that time my new (better? ;-)) assistant, kristos, arrived with his ATI X800 card which was equipped with an ATI Silencer 4, with it the card overclocked quite well

GPU: 544Mhz

MEM: 586Mhz

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On the previous page I told you to keep your eye on the base temperature, well after approx. 5 hours the thermal paste seemed to have settled VERY well as the idle/load temperature were now -65/-64°C !!



So anyway, on with the show

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Let’s install the X800



Next a re-fill of the CPU container and let’s start again:



Maxed out the X800 on air cooling and achieved a nice 100.000 score in Aquamark03, the CPU score is impressive.

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Intermezzo #2

Due to the hot weather we’re experiencing here in Belgium (a heat wave) we decided to cool of a bit, we played a game of who can hold Dry Ice the longest…



Colin won... :-)

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While I was insulating the X800:



kristos was refilling the GPU container with fresh Dry Ice



As you can see from the fuzzy photo below, the card is now running at -52°C and overclocking beyond our expectations was possible:

GPU: 544Mhz -> 644Mhz

MEM: 586Mhz - > 609Mhz


An action shot:



Aquamark03 increases a bit, not the best out there, but certainly not bad at all



Now this is the only screen I have of 3DMark2001SE because something weird was going on: 37729



EVERY time I ran the “Nature” benchmark the X800 reset it clocks back to 549Mhz without ANY reason. If you know what this is tell me, tried uninstalling ATI Tool and Rivatuner to no avail. Could this be a windows driver problem? A hardware issue? I just don’t know.

I threw in the towel when the X800 started acting up




Time to clean everything up and check to see if condensation got the better of my insulation ->