A Closer Look

Zotac has chosen to use the NVIDIA reference cooler as base for their cooler. The top orange metal cover seems to be made exclusively by Zotac.
On the cooler we see a large array of tightly packed fins which are fed with cool air by a cooler to the right.


You can clearly see the eight thermal pads cooling the individual memory chips and the large copper area which makes contact with the GPU core. Further to the right on the picture is another thermal pad which is used to cool the voltage regulation circuitry of the card.


SLI is possible by combining this card with any other 8800 GT card from any manufacturer. Using the SLI bridge is mandatory for using this card together with SLI. Before you ask, you can not use the 8800 GT with another 8800-non-GT card in SLI.


A high-performance card will definitely need some power, so you will find one PCI-E 6 pin power connector on the back of the card. Zotac was kind enough to leave a small indent in the metal cover to make it easier to plug the power connector in and out.


Eight GDDR3 memory chips are arranged neatly around the G92 GPU. Further to the right you can see a few empty pads near the card's power circuitry. To me this looks like we could even see a higher powered card using a similar PCB design.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Qimonda (formerly Infineon) and carry the model number HYB18H5123221BF-10. With a rated speed of 1.0 ns the card should be good for 1000 MHz at least.


The GPU is the NVIDIA G92 Revision A2, which is made in 65nm technology by TSMC. On the GPU 754M transistors can be found. Compared to the G80 (8800 GTX/Ultra) this is a "small" increase by 73 million. A reason for that is that NVIDIA has included the display output logic and new HD video decode features into this chip.