Zalman entered the graphics card market not too long ago with Radeon HD 6770, 6850 and 6870. Now it is time for a Radeon HD 7950 with Zalman’s own cooler and colored circuit board, called Zalman HD7950-Z.
Zalman has a good reputation for its fans and coolers, but since last year it has moved into the market for graphics cards and SSD. The company now has its own Radeon HD 7950 coming, with its VF3000 cooler. The cooler will keep the graphics circuit up to 20 degrees cooler than AMD’s reference cooling, and both fans sports red LED lighting. The cooler is pretty large though, which means it will take up three expansion slots .
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The card above sports AMD’s reference frequencies, 800 MHz on the GPUand 1250 MHz (5 000 MHz effectively) on the 3 GB GDDR5 memory. Zalman also has an overclocked version coming. The circuit board looks like AMD’s reference design, but we do see some things that stand out. It is still unclear when the card will make it to stores except that it will be soon.
When AMD lowers the price to $350, then it’s worth talking about. Until then a $450-460 HD7950 is a waste of $ against a $499 GTX680 or a $350 HD7870.