A Closer Look

NVIDIA's cooler is pretty symmetrical from both sides. Each side cools one GPU, memory and voltage regulators. The only difference is that the side with the PCI-E connector also cools the PCI-Express bridge chip. In the middle of the cooler there is just one fan which cools both sides equally well. It is connected to a fan controller chip and adjusts it speed according to temperature.


The SLI connector is covered by a little plastic piece. It is easily removed to give you access to the connector. Zotac's GeForce 9800 GX2 is compatible to any other 9800 GX2 card. To run two cards in Quad-SLI you need to have an SLI capable motherboard. To run one card (with two GPUs) you do NOT need an SLI capable motherboard.


The power plugs are covered by a sticker (for aesthetic reasons I guess). For operation you need to connect a 6-pin and an 8-pin power cable. You need both and two 6-pin cables will not work. Inside the package you find a number of adapter cables should you have an older PSU without those connectors.
Under another plastic cap you can see the SPDIF audio input for HDMI+Audio.


To make the power installation easier for the end user, NVIDIA has included some status LEDs behind the power plugs. When one or both light up red, something is wrong with the power setup. I actually thought the pretty green and red colors are just some visual bling effect and wondered why the damn card wouldn't work (no I don't read manuals).


Like on all current NVIDIA cards, GDDR3 is used. The Samsung chips carry the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A. Even though they have 1.0 ns latency (= 1000 MHz) we saw a stable memory overclock of over to 1100 MHz.


In order to connect the second GPU to the rest of the system, a PCI-Express bridge is used. The markings BR04 reveal that this chip is the nForce 200 PCI-Express 2.0 to PCI-Express 2.0 bridge used on the nForce 780i motherboard designs for example.
Unlike AMD, NVIDIA builds this chip themselves and won't have to buy it from external sources. Also the chip supports PCI-Express 2.0 (and 1.0, 1.1), where the AMD solution does not support PCI-E 2.0.
Please note that the bridge-like interconnect transports both SLI and PCI-Express signals, it's actually two cables stacked on top of each other.


The two GPUs are of the G92 flavor which has been used on a number of GeForce 8800 parts already. It is made at TSMC in a 65 nm process with 754 million transistors.
One GPU is installed the normal horizontal way, while the second one is rotated by 90 degrees. Probably to make the board design easier.