Introduction

For years now the majority of graphics cards have required significant cooling when running intensive 3D tasks. Despite this it would be fair to say that many manufacturers place little importance in the quality of the cooling systems attached to their hardware. There are some exceptions which have mainly come from Nvidia’s high end designs such as the 7800 and 8800 series however even ATI’s latest 2900 series still suffer from large and loud cooling solutions. So what happens if a fan just is not cutting it? Well, in the first of a two part article we turn to two of the most well known cooling experts, Zalman and Arctic Cooling to see the alternative cooling they offer for mainstream/budget and older cards such as the Radeon X1950.