A Closer Look

NVIDIA's cooler is a fairly complex design. In addition to the GPU and the memory, it also cools the voltage regulation circuitry, all in one cooler. This makes it a bit more difficult for 3rd party companies to design their own solutions because of the complex and expensive design.


The GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB can be used with a second card in SLI. Also NVIDIA will be announcing a future SLI configuration very soon, for their 780i Chipset Series, so stay tuned.


A powerful card like this definitely needs some juice. The power connector is located on the back of the card, under the top of the heatsink. I found this a bit hard to use in a small case since you can not see where exactly you have to plug in the power connector. Even though the card supports PCI-Express 2.0, which has a higher power delivery capability, it will not work without power connected, even in 2.0 mode.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Qimonda (formerly Infineon) and carry the model number HYB18H512321BF-10. With 1.0 ns latency (= 1000 MHz) they should have some headroom left for overclocking.


Just like on the GeForce 8800 GT, the GPU is the NVIDIA G92. It is fabricated in a 65 nm process, with 756 million transistors.