We disassembled the video card heatsink to take a look, see Figure 4. As you can see, the entire heatsink is made of copper.

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Figure 4: Video card with its heatsink detached.

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Figure 5: The entire heatsink is made of copper.

This video card uses four GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.2 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QC-BJ12)to give it 256 MB of video memory (512 Mbits x 4 = 256 MB). These chips can run up to 1.6 GHz. Since this video card accesses the memory at 1.38 GHz, there is almost 16% headroom for memory overclocking inside the memory’s specifications. But of course you can try overclock it over its specs. So, in theory this video card has good overclockable memories. Keep in mind that we are talking about a pre-production sample; the final model from ATI partners can use a different memory chip model.

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Figure 6: 1.2 ns GDDR3 memory chip used by ATI Radeon X1600 XT reference board.

The reference board doesn’t have video capture function (VIVO). However, as you can see on the left hand side in Figure 4, there is a place on the board to have an ATI Rage Theater chip soldered in the future, if an ATI partner wants to release a model with VIVO function.