A Closer Look

The majority of the cooler is made from Aluminum to save weight. Only the baseplate which is in direct contact with the core is Copper. This helps spread the heat quickly and then dissipate it in the fins.


Zotac mentions several times in the manual and on the package that some form of active cooling inside the case is strongly suggested to get rid of the hot air.


SLI is possible with the 8600 GT and any other 8600 class product. Since the card uses a one slot cooling solution it is even possible to run it on motherboards where space between the slots is limited. However, be extra careful with heat when running two of these babies in SLI.
What you can also see here is the white connector for the external audio input. When connecting the included audio cable to the motherboard's audio out you can include this audio signal in the fully digital HDMI output.


Please notice the lack of an external power connector. The GeForce 8600 Series has a rather modest power consumption, that's why it can live happily with the juice from the PCI-E bus only.


The naked card shows that the major components on the card are just GPU and memory.


The GDDR3 memory chips are the HY5RS123235 FP-14 flavour from Hynix. With their access time of 1.4ns they should be good for around 715 MHz. Installed memory size is 256 MB.


The GPU is the NVIDIA G84 Revision A2.