The Board
The most noticeable change ATI have made to this new card is in the design of the cooling unit. ATI have had a rough track record when it comes to their cooling solutions, with many of their designs featuring obnoxiously loud fans while still running quite warm. Compared to the behemoth that NVIDIA have attached to their current 7900 GTX as well as their older 7800 GTX 512 and Quadro cards, ATI has been lacking.
The new design is very reminiscent of some of the older replacement cooling options from Arctic Cooling, featuring a long swooping plastic body and large fan at the far end. In terms of appearance, some of us think the new design is very stylish while others think it looks slightly chintzy compared to what we're used to seeing on top end X1000 series cards. What lies underneath however far supercedes anything we've seen straight out of the factory from ATI. The new design uses two copper heatsinks in conjunction with a plastic fan, significantly larger than what was seen on the older cooler design. While the fan is still quite a bit smaller than what NVIDIA attaches to their 7900 GTX, there is alot more metal on this card than on the GTX and it's entirely copper rather than the primarily aluminum design of the competition. There is also a single heatpipe running from directly above the GPU to the middle of the stack of copper fins.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the X1950's cooling system is the entirely seperate copper memory heatsink covering each of the memory chips. Typical GPU coolers (if they cool the memory at all), spread the heat from the GPU and the memory chips around a single metal plate which is generally attached to the heatsink and fan. In this instance, the memory sink and the fan and heatsink combo for cooling the GPU are seperated by the sealed plastic base of the GPU unit. This should have a positive effect on the overall temperatures of the card when overclocking assuming that the lack of airflow over the memory heatsink doesn't cause too many problems. With the amount of copper dedicated to the memory however, it shouldn't be much of an issue.
The very deliberate amount of cooling dedicated to the memory may seem puzzling, however this is due to the primary selling point of the X1950 XTX - all new memory technology. Keep reading for more.
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