Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra TDH
Starting with the Ultra model of the two boards, we find more or less what you would expect to see from a GeForce 6800 Ultra board - Based around NVIDIAs NV40 core, the A400 Ultra TDH features sixteen pixel pipelines (or four pixel quads, depending on how you want to think of it) on a core running at 400MHz, as per the NVIDIA reference design. The Ultra also features six vertex shader units (compared to the cut-down five on a vanilla 6800), and 256Mb of GDDR3 RAM, clocked at 550MHz (or 1.1GHz effective). As with all GeForce 6800 Ultra boards, Leadtek's design features two Molex connectors to supply power to the card.
The most striking aspect of the A400 Ultra when you take it out of its box is the massive, strapping copper cooler attached to the board - This thing is big! The solution (as with most 6800 Ultra designs) takes up two slots in a case. The cooler doesn't just look the part though - It feels it too! Throw it on some scales, and you'll find that this board weighs in at around 750 grams - There's no doubt that this board feels very heavy, which certainly gives it the feel of a quality product. The cooler features a heatpipe arrangement to pull heat away from the GPU and towards the cooling fins, and the fan on top of the large heatsink is encase in a plastic sheath to make sure that any air is directed onto this heatsink, while also including a mesh guard to keep dust away from the fan.
At the rear of the board we find an equally hefty heatsink arrangement to aid with cooling and keep the RAM chips on the back of the card cool.
Taking a look at the backplate for the board, we find something which I wish we would see more often - Dual DVI support. Although those requiring this functionality may be a very small minority, it's just nice to see the option available and being put to use by some AIB partners, so kudos to Leadtek for including it in their top of the range product. Aside from that, we can see the backplate here is designed to occupy two slots in a case, and also the TV-out connector for the functionality available with these boards.
Now we've seen how the A400 Ultra looks, let's move down a notch to take a peek at the GT equivalent.
