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EVGA prepares water cooled e-GeForce 7950 GX2 |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 05 July 2006 |
EVGA is finishing up preliminary testing of its version of the GeForce 7950 GX2, namely the e-GeForce 7950 GX2 Black Pearl. It's a water cooled GeForce 7950 GX2 with more than hefty potential for overclocking. During preliminary testing, the board is hitting more than 600MHz for GPU clock with no significant problems, and the water cooled memory is also showing some strength, with clocks easily marching past the 1500MHz DDR mark, enabling total bandwidth of more than 96 gigabytes per second. Perhaps, even 100GB/s is reachable. These scores were achieved thanks to Innovatek's precise design and hand manufacturing of the dual waterblocks.
EVGA prepares water cooled e-GeForce 7950 GX2
The efficiency of water cooling is such that the EVGA team managed to lower the temperature on the front GPU by 30 °C, while the inner GPU is lowered by 23-27°C. The usual working temperature of the GeForce 7950 GX2 is around 77°C for front GPU and about 83-88°C for the inner one, but EVGA/Innovatek combo crashes the temperatures to really good 50°C range. The power consumption of the board is hovering in the 140-150 Watt range and getting in the higher 160-170 Watt range when running at overclocked speeds. The board will still be Quad SLI compatible.
The upper cooling bridge can be unmounted, turned by 180 degrees and mounted the other way, so that you can have two Black Pearl's working together. However, company representatives warned us that in that particular case, you need to use a water cooling kit that is able to handle around 400 Watts of thermal waste. EVGA is using a handmade water cooling block and that significantly raised the price of the product. We learned that the estimated street price is set at about €799-899. For future proofing, EVGA is currently selling an Innovatek designed 400W water cooling upgrade kit for about €199.
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