Zalman Radeon HD 7950-Z VF3000 2GB Video Card Review

Final Thoughts

I'm not shocked to see that Zalman has put together a strong video card that looks great. Considering Zalman's experience when it comes to cooling, you'd expect them to offer us something strong and as far as we're concerned, they've done that today.

If you're going to complain about anything there would have to be two areas - one doesn't bother us and the other is just something that we would've liked to have seen. The bundle is of course on the light side of things. It's so light in fact that we don't actually even have a manual. Really, though, it's not something that bothers us too much.

What I would've liked to have seen out of Zalman, though, is a bit of an overclock out of the box. Zalman has done such a good job with the video card by adding their own cooler to it, it would've been really nice if they took advantage of that a little more by bumping up the clock speeds. It didn't have to be anything major, just a 50 - 100MHz core bump and a 100 - 200MHz QDR memory bump.

It's not a huge deal, but considering we know the overclocking potential of the AMD Radeon HD 7950, combined with the quality of the cooler that Zalman has used, it would've been nice to see them give the video card a bit of a speed bump. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from doing it yourself.

I think one of the biggest problems for Zalman is going to be availability. While they're not new to the market, they're new to the video card market and it's a market that is very crowded and very competitive. It's going to take time for stores to pick up Zalman and start stocking them on their shelves.

Hopefully it's not too long before this happens, though. Having a look today at the Zalman HD 7950-Z VF3000, we can see that the company know what to do. They're also ahead of many video card companies when it comes to cooling solutions because of the background they have in this business.

If Zalman can offer more quality products like the one we have here today, in a timely fashion and a reasonable price, they've got a good chance in this market. We'll be following them over the coming months to see what they bring to the table.