[EAsY_BakE]

first of all i am new to the forums so hi to everyone.

more to the point, i just recently picked up a x800xl 512mb card for my main rig, (am planning on buying another one for a crossfire setup) and it is the sapphire version with the x850 series cooler and i was wondering if anyone knew what the sound output (dba) of this cooler is. i am going to buy a new cooler and i would like to have a number to compare there noise levels with.

[Quailane]

I didn't think they were making 512mb crossfire cards. You can't just put two cards that are the same in a motherboard with two 16x pci-e slots like you can with nvidia. How much was the X800XL? Pretty much the only game you would notice a difference in with 512mb over 256mb is Doom3.

One problem with have a sound value is that all these places don't measure exactly the same under the same conditions. Also, a fan can be quieter than another, but the tone it produces is very annoying.

Also, the fan changes speed at different temperatures anyway, so if you are keeping it not overclocked there is absolutely no point in changing the cooler. It stays very quiet and will never get loud under normal operation unless your case fans die. Maybe the fan on your card is different than my x800pro's, but I don't think so. It is the best stock cooler I have come across in a long time. I get 636Mhz on my core with it and the fan at 100%, but at that point it is loud. Turning the fan down to the automatic setting decreases my overclock to 630Mhz, but the fan stays quiet no matter what.

[EAsY_BakE]

first i know all about the crossfire master and slave type system. and i am not sure whether or not they are making 512mb cards, but i am sure that some time in the future they will...

second like i said iam not looking for exact science. i am going for near silence. my cpu is water cooled and i put a passive heatpipe cooler on the north brige. but when i switched from my x800xt to my xl (so that i could change to pci-e and also for the 512mb (which, contrary to what you said gains a large bennifit from the 512mb fram buffer. my frame rates are not much higher but i can get those same frame rates with 6xfsaa and 16xfsaf versus 4xfsaa and 8xfsaf with the 256 due to the fact that those extra samples no longer cause my card to fill up the framebuffer and run over into my system ram)) any way, the new cooler is much louder than the stock x800xt cooler.