With the box and its content out the way, it’s time to look closer at the CE. The front of the card is just simply covered in this massive cooler. We can see the dual 80mm fans on the front of the card and all the aluminum running back and forth.
The bottom of the card shows the four heat pipes that run off the heatsink that covers the thermal electronic cooler. The TEC works with one side being cool and the other being hot due to the electricity. The heat pipes run in a couple sets of two - the heat pipes running to the right of the card cools it on the bottom, while the heat pipes running to the left sit on top. The two 80mm fans spin around cooling down the heat pipes and of course keeps the top layer (hot part) of the TEC unit as cool as possible. Previously you wouldn’t contemplate cooling something like this with just fan cooling but with the way that heat pipes have gone in recent times, air cooling is extremely effective.
The overall result of all this is that the core is cooler than any conventional cooling solution and in turn helps us overclock better than before. GeCube say that speeds of 681MHz+ on the core can be achieved and 1600MHz DDR on the memory over the stock 575/1380 setup found on the standard Radeon X1950PRO. To achieve these clocks you have to use the Catalyst Control Center overclocking portion – which is a pain in the butt, as we much prefer to use ATI Tool which tests for artifacts while overclocking. We will talk further about the overclock though on the next page.
The side of the card shows us our standard PCI Express 6-pin power connector along with an extra connector that has an adapter that goes to a 4-pin Molex connector. This is used for the TEC unit, as mentioned it runs off electricity and this is where it comes from.
The top of the card shows us the Crossfire connector but the problem is when you install another X1950PRO, the card’s sit very close together that you really wouldn’t feel comfortable with the amount of air that the two fans are capable of pulling in.
Looking at the I/O side of things we can clearly see that the card takes up more than two slots. Included are two DVI connectors along with the TV out connector. The problem though with the card is that it is just so big. You can see that with it laying down this way there is still a significant gap between the second slot and the end of the card.
