As you could see from the pictures posted in the previous page, this video card uses a fancy cooler that blows the hot air generated by the video card to outside the computer, thus helping to keep the computer inside cool. The side effect is that this cooler makes the video card to use two slots on the motherboard and on the case, killing the PCI or PCI Express slot right next to it.

We disassembled this cooler to take a look, see Figure 4. The base is made of copper, with a copper heat-pipe connecting the base to the aluminum fins. The aluminum heatsink touches the memory chips.

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Figure 4: Cooler used on MSI overclocked GeForce 8600 GTS.

In Figure 5, you can see this video card without its cooler.

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Figure 5: MSI overclocked GeForce 8600 GTS without its cooler.

This video card uses four GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.4 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QE-BJ1A) as you can see in Figure 6, making the 256 MB of memory this video card has. These chips can officially run up to 2 GHz (1 GHz x 2) and since on this video card the memory chips are running at 2.1 GHz they are already overclocked, running 5% above their official spec.

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Figure 6: Samsung GDDR3 512-Mbit 1 ns chip.

This video card supports HDMI and it comes with one DVI-to-HDMI adapter and one HDMI cable, so you can connect it directly to your HDTV set with the best quality possible (assuming that your HDTV set has a HDMI input, of course).

This video card doesn’t come with any game. In Figure 7, you can see the video component cable, the S-Video cable, the two DVI-to-VGA adapters, the DVI-to-HDMI adapter and the HDMI cable.

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Figure 7: Cables and adapters that come with this video card.