A Closer Look

The fan uses a different fan concept that can do without the traditional blades. The air is sucked in and routed away in a 90° angle, this approach is called blower fan. Good choice here NVIDIA.


Two SLI connectors are available for future configurations like three or four cards in SLI. At this time you can only do SLI with two cards using either of the SLI connectors.


This is the Radeon X1900 XTX and the GeForce 8800 GTX side by side. You can see that the GeForce is quite a bit longer, the card should fit into all regular cases though. Exact length is 27 cm. Having the power connectors angled 90° helps with the length requirements.


NVIDIA "still" uses GDDR3 memory with 1.1ns cycle time which should be good for about 900 MHz. Having 768 MB of GDDR4 on the card would be excessively expensive for only rather small gains. Not to mention that ATI keeps buying all GDDR4 stock.


This is one big mother of a cooler. Not only the GPU and memory are cooled, but also several other chips like voltage regulator and TMDS output.


When the cooler is removed you can see just how big the GPU is.


The GPU used is the G80 revision A2 which is the latest available.


If you look closely, you can see that the big Grey chunk of metal is not the actual die, but a heatspreader which protects the die from damage during cooler mounting.


On the GeForce 8800 the TMDS display output logic has been moved away from the core into a separate chip, made by NVIDIA. This allows greater design flexibility for future configurations. When several GPUs are working together you need only one set of outputs. If you had a couple of GPUs with their own unused output logic this would mean wasted silicon space and money. Also a physics card does not need any display output logic.


Shortly before the official launch of the GTX, a resistor flaw was discovered that needed a recall of all cards. This is the resistor that needed to be changed to make sure the overcurrent protection does not trigger during normal use.


The black dot below the N identifies this card as a card that has the resistor fix installed.