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. It works really good and is a quiet solution as well.


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.


In comparison to other cards on the market, the GeForce 8800 GTX (left) is certanly the biggest. In the middle we have the new Radeon HD 2900 XT and on the right is the Radeon X1900 XTX.


GDDR3 is still the memory of choice for high-end video cards. It is available in large quantities, high clock speeds and at a fair price. The Zotac overclocked card is running at 1000 MHz memory which a small overclock from the 1.1 ns memory chips.


The cooler is a very complex design. In addition to GPU and memory it cools other parts like voltage regulator and TMDS chip as well.


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


The GPU used is the G80 revision A2.


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.