Card appearance and thoughts
GeCube has opted to do away with caution and the reference heatsink design on the FZ Cool, with FZ denoting freezer – BRRR! It's a brave move, because the reference cooler works very well. The original design results in a card that fits into a single slot and it actively cools both the GPU core and memory with a temperature-controlled fan.
Instead of the svelte original, GeCube has bolted a behemoth cooler on to its X1950 Pro. Gone is the compact original, replaced with a hulking, triple-slot cooler endowed with a pair of 80mm fans. While your friends may be impressed at your cooler's girth, you may find that it makes it unusable on certain motherboards in a CrossFire configuration, due to a lack of space between the PEG slots.
The cooler works by sandwiching two heatpipe coolers one on top of another, with the TEC inbetween. The idea is that the TEC drops the temperature of the lower plate, while the second cooler cools the TEC. As you'd expect, this results in higher power consumption than a normal X1950 Pro; the card consumes about 20W more than cards based on the reference design. This will be mainly from the power consumption of the TEC, but a small part of it will also be due to the greater onboard framebuffer – 512MiB vs. 256MiB for most X1950 Pros.
With temperatures of 36C at idle and 53C under load, this results in much better cooling performance than the reference heatsink's 43C and 68C, respectively. However it doesn't look that good in comparison to the 35C and 50.5C provided by Sapphire's Zalman-cooled X1950 Pro ULTIMATE edition, which is also considerably quieter.
We found that the cooler on the back of the TEC wasn't getting hot, even under load. We thought maybe this was because the rear fan on that cooler was running constantly and creating quite a lot of noise. However, when we stopped the fan the fins of the cooler remained at the same temperature. This is a pity, because if the fan was slowed down and created less noise the cooler would probably manage to be as quiet as it's supposed to be.
In addition, the cooler provides no cooling for the memory chips, which just lie bare, and this is a step down from the reference design and the Sapphire ULTIMATE, which both provide some form of RAM cooling.
Twin dual-link DVI is provided, so the card will run a pair of ultra-high-resolution (QWXGA) monitors, however only one of the ports is HDCP compliant. The card also carries TV-Out via a DIN port, but as with many other X1950 Pros it doesn't support VIVO.
On the back of the card you can see that the massive cooler is only held in place with four bolts around the GPU core. At the top-right you can see the contacts where, if you have the relevant hardware, you can attach this card to another RV570.
The FZ Cool is touted to allow performance increases of up to 15%, although we didn't find it overclocked as well as it was supposed to. And although the card comes with the appropriate Samsung 800MHz GDDR3 memory, it isn't pre-overclocked to the correct speed. Instead, it runs at 688.5MHz (1377MHz effective). Further, the core speed is a reference 574MHz, as well. It’s up to the user, then, to push the clocks up.
