facebook rss twitter

Review: GeCube Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 FZ Cool Fan HDCP Edition

by Josh Blodwell on 9 March 2007, 08:22

Tags: GeCube Radeon X1950, Gecube

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qahyx

Add to My Vault: x

Thoughts, where2buy, right2reply

On paper the FZ Cool's a great product. As our testing shows, though, doubling the framebuffer to 512MiB doesn’t result in a massive increase in performance over the 256MiB buffer as used in the Sapphire ULTIMATE Edition.

Additionally, when it's out of the box and sitting in your computer you start to see some niggly problems. The cooler, while interesting, is far too chunky. The fact that the cooler makes the card three slots wide, instead on one, wouldn't be a problem if it fulfilled the promise of low noise output.

The massive cooler doesn't mean massive overclocks, either, and the lack of a guaranteed overclock makes you wonder if it's worth the wad of extra money. In comparison to the Sapphire X1950 Pro ULTIMATE, or even a vanilla X1950 Pro for £50 less, it just isn't.

HEXUS Where2Buy

The GeCube Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB GDDR3 FZ Cool Fan HDCP Edition is available online for around £165.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of GeCube's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

« PREVIOUS PAGE

HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Posted by lost eden - Fri 09 Mar 2007 08:50
I knew straight away that the cooler wouldn't be any good if it didn't have a dedicated power feed for the peltier element - a 20W peltier is virtually useless for improving cooling performance of a moder graphics chip. A 68W or even a 137W unit with a separate power supply would have made a difference.
Posted by chuckskull - Sat 10 Mar 2007 01:45
Seems kinda half assed to me. A very low end Peltier on a what is now a midrange card. For not much more you can get a 8800GTS 320MB which will leave this card in the dust no matter how much cooling and clocking it has.

It's not even 10fps faster than a bog standard 256meg X1950pro which is £50 less, and doesn't need a 3 slot cooler.
Posted by LordSimon - Sun 11 Mar 2007 08:34
Before I even read up to the benchmark page, I already thought this is crappy idea of putting TEC cooler on a mid range card. For not much more money, one can buy Geforce GTS 8800 and could probably get double of the performance.
Posted by CrazyMonkey - Sun 11 Mar 2007 16:54
Well looks and ownage factor seems to score high. But for £20 odd more i would rather have a 320MB 8800GTS :D
Posted by mat-d-rat - Wed 14 Mar 2007 21:28
Would of been nice to see a standard 521mb 1950pro card in the test line up as well. Is the extra memory worth the money? (512 instead of 256) for dual screen system (only single screen for games, 2nd screen for ts etc.)