GeCube FzCool X1950PRO review
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 15 Dec 2006

Although it seems quite ordinary when you take a look at the specs - based on 80nm RV570GPU (575MHz) with 256-bit (512-bit internal ring-bus) 1400MHz 512MB GDDR3 memory and 35 Pixel pipelines, this card is quite different from anything else GeCube has to offer. TEC (Thermal Electric Cooler) is a thing that should make all the difference and GeCube says that you should be able to OC this card at least 15%(memory) and 20%(core) and still be within workable limits. Is it that good? Read on...
TEC is something that older readers might know about back from the first Pentium CPU days. Back then, TEC cooler could cool down your CPU quite efficently by using electricity. Cooling down the CPU with TEC is quite different to water cooling - if nothing else, it's much more practical because there's no pump, pipes and stuff - this is all solid state, "inside" the "cooler". There's quite a few speculations why TEC coolers aren't so hype anymore, varying from "it's not so cool as watercooling" to "condensation" and "it draws too much power". Let's say it's a little bit of all of these and move on to what's important, and that's putting this product through its paces and our oppinions about it.

We ran our benchmarks on our standard testbed:
- EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo X6700
- OCZ Platinum XTC DDR2-1000
- OCZ GameXstream PSU
- Western Digital RaptorX
- Coolermaster Aquagate
- Dell 3007 LCD monitor

Also, we used our standard benchmarking tools - 3dMark 2005 and 2006, Battlefield 2, Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Prey and X3 Demo. All of these tools were used with 4xAA/16xAF and 6xAA/16xAF setting so the results are comparable to the X1950XTX review we posted a couple of days ago. When we compare 3dMark scores (in 2005 - 12821 for XTX and 10792 for X1900PRO and in 2006 - 6543 "against" 5239), I'd say this card has some potential. You can check more X1950XTX results here.
Before we go on with benchmark, just a little "slide". Although we managed to OC this card quite a bit (10% memory and 16% core), at first we don't think this cooling solution is good enough for it. The fact of the matter is that we had quite a few benchmark crashes (X3, Battlefield 2, Oblivion) and that they stopped crashing the second we installed additional 12cm fan to blow on the card from outside. We should also take into consideration that EVGA's 680i-based motherboard has a chipset fan that's blowing directly away from the VGA card, and, in this case - very close to the back side of the place where GPU is therefore extracting the heat from the card. It would also be fair to say that 8800's didn't mind that at all. By doing a closer inspection we saw that cooler has a bit weird angle and it's not really in "parallel" with the card itself, which could have something to do with this. So, we took these crashes with a bit of distance because this just might be the reason. And we were not about to play around with a screwdriver but eventually we did and levelled the cooler and poof - problems were gone.