Review (part 2): ATI FireGL X3

ATI's FireGL is a red-looking graphics card, with half its surface covered by copper cooling fins and the fan.
Copper has high thermal conductivity, which means it dissaptes heat faster than most other metal, and twice that of aluminum. (The drawback is that copper costs more.) It's too bad the board gets hidden inside the case.

The other item of significance is that the board has its own power cable. It cannot draw sufficient power from the bus, so it's got an extra cable with a standard socket that connects to one sets of wires coming out of the computer's power supply. Most of today's power supplies have plenty of connector cables, so this should not be a problem.

Some specs of the FireGL X3:

+ Designed for Linux and Windows 2000 SP1 or XP
+ Certified for OpenGL and DirectX
+ 256MB RAM
+ Three-year warranty.
+ Made in China

Outputs are:
+ Two DVI (digital video interface), and comes with two DVI-VGA adapters
+ Output to two monitors, wtih different resolutions and refresh rates.
+ Stereo3D connector
+ Outputs to 9-megapixel displays.

It runs on:
+ Intel Pentium 4 or Xeon
+ AMD Athlon or Opteron
+ Requires AGP v3.0 4X/8X bus
+ Requires that the computer have the latest AGP chipset drivers.
+ 300W power supply

Annoyingly enough, there is no printed manual included in the package. More sign of cost cutting: the \Usersguide folder of the CD has guides for four different models:

- FireGL_V3200_V3100_UG.pdf
- FireGL_V5100_UG.pdf
- FireGL_V7100_UG.pdf
- FireGL_X3_UG.pdf

Hmm... no sign of CAD-specific information. More to come later in Part 3.