Power Play

Lots more caps and vregs on the GT..

The used Zalman is damn Old

The Cooler on the Cards is actually an over 3 year old model from Zalman and even the cheapest one, the VF700ALCU. Its performance wasn't enough to keep a x1800xt stable, you needed the VF900 for it. Its performance was good in old R300 Times when it hit the streets first time, but nowadays its acutally one of the worse coolers especially as it is twoslot while the default cooler ist only singleslot for this card.
The X1950XTX Cooler is also more silent by a good margin and has a lot more cooling Capacity, they should have gone for something similar to that.
There are also cheaper all Aluminium Solutions that deliver equal or better performance and low noise, like that what Palit used on the X1950pro Extreme or Powercolor uses on HD2600XT. But of course everything where Zalman stands on must be good no matter how old, so from marketing point of view it was a sensible decision by Gigabyte to bundle the Card with this old VF700ALCU.

yes giz, and...?

is your point that this is a good or bad thing?

if u read the reviews hear, i seem to remember them saying that the caps are all nasty, in that u can adjust voltages and stuff on the fly thru software, like u can in the red card?!