Gainward Rampage 700 Golden Sample Goes Like Hell Gamers Edition (4870 X2 -ed.)

The first triple-slot cooler we've seen wins the game of product name length. As for everything else? Well...

Dual slot coolers were a bit silly when they came out. But we got used to them, and shrugged them off as what you needed for intense graphical performance.

Then we got used to them.

Now we've witnessed our first ever stock triple slot cooler, the Gainward 4870 X2 Goes Like Hell Rampage etc etc. There’s so much bumpf on the box it’s hard to actually work out the product name! Awesome? Well, let's let the benchmarks speak for themselves, and then get to the extravagant cooler.



We threw this, as well as two other 4870 X2s, at a Nehalem system powered by an SSD and running 64-bit Windows Vista. The contenders were the triple slot behemoth, an overclocked Asus 4870 X2 and our reference AMD/ATI card, which has taken a bit of a beating over the few months we've had it in our labs.

Here are the 3D Mark Vantage GPU scores:

AMD/ATI reference: 14,050
ASUS overclocked 4870 X2: 13,031
Gainward Rampage (truncated) Gamer's Edition: 12,392

So, as it turns out, it's an average performer. But wait! Surely there are some upsides to that monstrous cooler?

Frankly, erm, no. It's unnecessary. It's like a Gillette Mach 13 (or whatever they're up to now) razor. You'd be hard pressed to measure the difference, but on the plus side, it does look imposing.



Say you're planning on filling your motherboard with all sorts of extravagant expansion cards. Well, you're out of luck, because this hulking behemoth renders two of them useless for no appreciable performance benefit.

Should you want to Crossfire a pair of them, you'll have trouble fitting them in your system, with no guarantees that they’ll electrically fit on your motherboard nor that they'll fit in your case. And you'd have lost four expansion slots, while using only two. There's no room for anything else on most motherboards in that arrangement.



So on its own, in the performance stakes, it's great. But that's only because it is a 4870 X2. And compared to the other dual slot X2s on the market, it's not as fast. And it's also more expensive than it should be, because of the heat sink arrangement.

Yes, if you wanted to overclock the bejesus out of it, you'd probably be able to get the thing running faster than a card with a stock cooler. But the benefits of doing that are outweighed by the cost increase and expandability hit you have to take.

But hey, at least ATI-based cards are now seen as good enough to take silly risks on, which is more than we could say for them a year ago.