10-17-2003, 11:11 PM
The advantage of thermal sensors on the Radeon XTs is not only in the fact that you can automatically overclock it, but that you can underclock it when needed. In fact, I understand that when the temperature of a Radeon XT card goes critical, future Catalyst drivers will be able to shut down hardware acceleration and switch to software rendering to reduce the chance of a dramatic melt down. This of course is a "promised feature" that will be "coming soon", so you may or may not want to wait for it.