Well since a rating of 5 is stated as "Ingress of dust is not entirely prevented, but it must not enter in sufficient quantity to interfere with the satisfactory operation of the equipment; complete protection against contact"
I suppose that's better than my current card. Though I'd rather see a 6 rating. I may have to look into it once it's released.
Here’s an example of just how hard some graphics card manufacturers work to differentiate their products from the competition.
XFX has just released a single-slot Radeon HD 5770 that features, wait for it, dust protection. Yep, you read that right, dust protection!
Here’s the complete spec:
- Single slot profile
- 1GB GDDR5 memory
- ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays
- ATI Eyefinity5 Edition (for HD-577ZX-Z5F3)
- Supports up to five panels via ATI Eyefinity technology
- Supports Single Large Surface (SLS) Mode up to 2560 x 1600 per output.
- ATI Stream technology
- IP5x Dust Protection Standard
- High Performance Japanese Solid Capacitors
- Designed for DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL
- Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
- Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions
- Supports OpenGL 3.1
- Dual-mode ATI CrossFireX technology support for highly scalable performance
- ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
- Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
- DL-DVI, DL-DVI, Mini-DisplayPort
- 5x Mini-DisplayPort (for HD-577ZX-Z5F3)
- PCI Express® 2.1 support
There’s little in the way of explanation as to what benefit the IP dust proofing rating of IP5X has to offer. Neither is there any clarity on what part of the graphics card is dust proofed (fan would be the most sensible part).
I can’t find this at retailers just yet, but I expect pricing to be around $150.
