Reference Board Examination
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Have you ever heard NVIDIA mention that NV43 is "the Doom3 GPU" ? Me neither, so I was a bit surprised to see iD's graphical showcase show up on the branding plate for the diminuitive board. Puzzling.
In order to negate the need for a new, longer PCB for the AGP version of 6600 GT, NVIDIA have rotated the GPU and DRAM arrangement. Failing to do so would have been necessitated a bigger board. Futhermore, with the bridge package aligned regularly with the PCB, the trace lengths between GPU and bridge package, and then on to the AGP physical connector on the far side, are kept short. Signal strength is therefore improved and board cost reduced. While the bridge package and its heatsink add board cost, cost is kept mimimal with clever board layout.
As you can see, the board uses a 4-pin power connector to deliver the extra that the AGP slot can't provide. Also, unlike the PCI Express reference board, it sports a pair of DVI connectors instead of DVI and analogue DSUB. The SLI connector on the PEG 6600 GT disappears for obvious reasons. The final differences lie in the AGP board dropping the Philips SAA711HL video input processor. The backside of the board shows the solder pads for it, with no chip present.
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There's also some extra power circuitry on the AGP board to handle the extra power fed by the external connector.
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You can see Samsung's omnipresent GC20 GDDR K4J55323QF DRAM devices poking out from under the main heatsink. They're obviously not discretely cooled by the heatsink in any way, the ICs running cool enough to drop that requirement. Four 256Mbit (32MB) parts do the trick, for 128MB of total card memory.
The comments I made about the fan noise in the PCI Express board article apply here too. Copy and paste ahoy, "Noise-wise, the 6600 GT fan, even at full speed, doesn't trouble the senses. It's audible, sure, but it's nothing that'll give you nightmarish flashbacks to NV30 and the famous GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Quiet and unobtrusive are the key words."
No nudies of the bridge or GPU I'm afraid, I have some other stuff to do with the board before I think about pulling the heatsinks off. I'll update if and when I get round to it.
