A Closer Look

The cooler is made from aluminum, it is a design exclusive to Biostar and works quite well. It is not loud and easily blends in with other fans in your system.


The cooler is mounted with four screws that stand out a bit on the back of the card, if you have very little space around the card this might be a tight fit.


SLI is possible by combining this card with any other 8600 GTS card from any manufacturer. When using the V8603TS51 512 MB card with a 256 MB card it will be downgraded to use only 256 MB when in SLI.


The card comes with one six pin PCI-E power connector. Unlike the cards from ATI, the card will work without external power connected, even in 3D. If for some reason the card senses that it may run out of power, the NVIDIA driver will tell you that you should connect the external power and that 3D performance has been reduced to avoid overloading the bus power supply.


Four GDDR3 memory chips are installed on each side of the card.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A with an access speed of 1.0 ns, which means they should be good for 1000 MHz at least.


The GPU is the NVIDIA G84 Revision A2.