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As you can see, the card remains faithful to the reference layout and cooling solution with only the standout purple PCB (printed circuit board) making you look twice to compare over another GeForce4 Ti4400 or Ti4600 card. The cooling solution is pretty much identical to the reference design. Like other cards we've seen, the PNY doesn't make any attempt to cool the memory modules, either actively with a heatsink and fan or even passively with a just a heatsink.
The TinyBGA memory modules used on these cards (manufactured by Samsung on this board) don't require any cooling at all to run at the frequencies required to feed the NV25 with geometry and texture data. Cooling solutions just add to the cost and in a market as competitive as the graphics card market, your pennies and pounds are what matters so cost savings become paramount.
Being an nView capable card, the card is equipped with regular D-Sub output, DVI output from the integrated TMDS on the core and also an S-Video/Composite TV-Out connector using a Connexant CX25871. As with the other Connexant CX25871 solutions we've seen on the likes of the Visiontek Ti4400, the TV-out quality is excellent.
nView is NVIDIA's multi-display technology allowing you to drive multiple display outputs using one card. nView is fairly flexible and in this usual configuration with DVI, TV and regular analogue monitor outputs, the D-Sub and TV outputs will be used most frequently in an nView configuration. You can clone the outputs so whatever appears on one output also appears on the 2nd output at the same time or you can span your desktop across both outputs with one output becoming the left hand of your desktop and the other output becomes the right hand side.
nView allows for seperate bit depths, resolutions and refresh rates per output from the sophisticated TMDS hardware on NV25 equipped cards. Lastly when talking about nView, it also offers 1024x768 output on the TV output, a rarity on hardware at this level and a welcome boost for some. You can output in S-Video or composite formats and display on the TV as already noted was quite excellent and eminently watchable with piped video output to the TV looking excellent. Not quite the quality I get from my standalone DVD player (both using S-Video output) but very good all the same.
Using my usual test DVD of Devil's Advocate and PowerDVD XP, watching the film was excellent. This reviewer is quite a fan of nView and the flexibility you get from a decent multi-display implementation. Only possibly Matrox does it better on hardware at this level.
Onto the card features!
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