Sapphire HD 7750 Ultimate Video Card
A Closer Look |
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The 7750 series of cards offer the new Cape Verde GPU which is targeted at the main stream line user. If you are looking for a card that huge amounts of band width, shaders and other features well you might as well go look somewhere else. The 7750 Ultimate is meant to for the average user that needs to have some of the newest features in a GPU but does not intend to use for a kick-a$$gaming system. The market that this card is going for is for those that might jump in and play a game once in awhile but is more into streaming videos or watching Blu-Ray movies through their HTPC.
 A quick look on the exposed PCB side of the card shows us that there is very little items that are sticking up that could give us an issue and that there is more restrictions for airflow. 
Here is the side that you really want to look at, where the passive cooler resides. You can see that the cooler covers the entire card surface and them some. Like most coolers and of course any passive cooler the cooling is done with a heat pipe set up. Using a fan and heat pipe cooling means you can push up the speed of the card and a few tweaks with the fan speed you can get some really great performance and reliability. Without the presents of a cooling fan you really do not want to take a chance on over clocking the card, but if you dare to do so you must make sure that you have plenty… a lot… of airflow in and out of your case.
So without having a fan to cool the GPU you need to have as much surface area as possible to remove the heat from the heat pipes, thus the massive amount of the cooling fins you see. A stylish black heat shield is placed over the top of the center heat sinks for two reasons. One is to deflect the hot rising air out and through the cooling fins as much as possible and the other reason is to keep you fingers away from the super hot heat sink. come on you would touch it to “just to see if it was hot”… it is so leave it alone.  From this point of view we get a look at a few things. The first one we will go over is the outputs for displays. SAPPHIRE gives you plenty of choices to connect the 7750 to the monitor of your choice with 1 x Dual-Link DVI, 1 x HDMI (with 3D), and 1 x DisplayPort. The other thing that we notice right away is that the card is rather thick. For a mid-range card it does take up two slots (almost 2.5), but we know this is due to the fact that it is a passive cooling card and the heat sink requires more surface space to ensure sufficient cooling. 
I know one of the first things I did when I took the 7750 Ultimate out of the static bag was to look over the large size of the cooling setup just for the fact if it could interfere with other items in a PC. The rap-around design over the edge of the card helps maximize the surface area for cooling thus not having to make it taller or longer, which really could cause a problem.
 One thing that you do want to know and remember is that the cooling fins on the heat sink does rise above the card a total of 13 mm. It may not see like much but if you are looking to jam everything into a compact HTPC case or another tiny case this could be an issue. I found that moving it around it on the test bench setup that everything appeared to clear it and have just enough space to add other cards and stuff. |
