We removed the cooler used by this video card and you can see it on Figures 4 and 5. As you can see, it uses a copper base with a heat-pipe connecting the base to the heatsink fins. The cooler also touches the memory chips.

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Figure 4: Cooler used by GeForce 8800 GTS.

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Figure 5: Cooler used by GeForce 8800 GTS. Here you can see the heat-pipe that connects the copper base to the heatsink fins.

On Figure 6 you have an overall look of the GeForce 8800 GTS without its cooler. Two things caught our attention. First the size of the graphics chip, far bigger than chips from previous generations. And the second thing was a place for soldering a connector on the top left corner of the board besides the SLI connector (right now we don’t know the use of this connector, but we will ask nVidia).

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Figure 6: GeForce 8800 GTS without its cooler.

This video card uses ten GDDR3 256-Mbit 1.1 ns chips from Hynix (HY5RS573225AFP-11) as you can see on Figure 7, making the 320 MB of memory this video card has. These chips can run up to 1.8 GHz (900 MHz x 2). Since on this video card the memories were running at 1.7 GHz, there is room left for overclocking the memories even more inside their specs. Of course you can try pushing them above their specs.

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Figure 7: Hynix GDDR3 256-Mbit 1.1 ns chip.

On Figure 8 you can see the GeForce 8800 GTS chip (codenamed G80).

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Figure 8: GeForce 8800 GTS chip (G80).

The model we reviewed came with one full game, Company of Heroes, and with two DVI-to-VGA adapters, one S-Video cable, one Component Video adapter and one power adapter to be used if your power supply doesn’t have an auxiliary PCI Express power connector.

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Figure 9: Cables and adaptors that comes with this video card.