Zalman to release a HD 7950 with VF3000 cooler

Zalman recently became an AMD graphics card partner not that long ago and its now jumping on the HD 7000 series bandwagon with its version of the HD 7950 graphics card. Zalman have taken the AMD reference HD 7950 PCB design (except the colour) and fitted the Zalman VF3000 VGA cooler to it.

To us it appears Zalman have simply slapped a custom cooler onto a HD 7950 without much thought. They use the trademark AMD red colour on the graphics card cooler which is always matched with black (in the case of traditional AMD colouring) and yet they decided it would be a good idea to use blue PCBs (t0 match the trademark Zalman blue) even though the reference HD 7950s use black PCBs.

Although the cooler boasts up to 20 degrees lower temperatures than the reference design you can clearly see the memory chips and VRM both sit on the PCB without any direct cooling, they will simple rely on case air flow and the two Zalman fans to push enough air over them to keep them cool. We think overclocking the memory on this type of card might be slightly problematic but the GPU chip itself should be very good.

Negatives aside though if this card is competitively priced then you should get a high amount of overclocking potential combined with better acoustics and thermals when making comparisons to the reference design. Pricing, availability and warranty information isn’t available just yet.

Source: PC Watch Akiba