Reference Board Examination
The board itself is instantly recognisable as a 6-series GeForce product from NVIDIA, familiar cooler adorning the standard green PCB. Indeed, it appears to be the same PCB and component design to power GeForce 6800 GT in days gone by. NVIDIA have chosen a copper-based cooler to keep the heat output from the GPU managed, with aluminium used for the memory devices.
Like the GeForce 6800 GT it replaces, it’s a product that sports a single slot cooler, and, being PCI Express, carries a PEG16X electrical slot and a 6-pin port for supplementary power. 256MiB of Samsung’s 500MHz-rated memory, as found on the older GT, provides the on-board storage on the end of a 256-bit wide memory bus.
NVIDIA don’t choose to equip it with dual DVI ports this time around, and shame on them for that (with cheaper GeForce 6600 GT boards flaunting a pair for over a year now), so here’s hoping AIB partners producing the retail hardware ignore NVIDIA’s lead with the reference hardware and come up with the goods in the display output stakes.
The cooler itself is quiet in 2D mode when spinning at a reduced rate, noise levels rising to something tolerable in 3D mode, but levels which could and should be quieter, especially in this day and age of intelligent cooler designs. Look out for AIBs changing the cooler for something a bit better, hopefully.
Thankfully, since it makes my job that bit easier to explain, it’s something you’ve seen before and should be familiar with. Not a small board compared to some, but it pushes most of the right buttons and these days AIB partners have the skills to push the boat out, fixing some of the larger issues inherent to this board and cooler design.
To sum up, I’d live with one in my own PC system on a 24/7 basis, but only just.
![copper-based cooler](http://img.hexus.net/v2/graphics_cards/nvidia/nv42gs/images/heatsink-big.jpg"){kind=link}