We disassembled the video card heatsink to take a look, see Figure 4. If you pay close attention you will see that the base of the heatsink – the part that touches the graphics chip – is made of copper. The heatsink fins are also made of copper, as you can see in Figure 5. The fan blows the hot air to outside the computer case, helping a lot to decrease the PC internal temperature. But, because of this blower, besides the x16 PCI Express slot this video card uses the slot right next to it (usually a x1 PCI Express slot).

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Figure 4: Video card with its heatsink detached.

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Figure 5: Copper fins.

This video card uses eight GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.2 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QC-BJ12)to give it 512 MB of video memory (512 Mbits x 8 = 512 MB). These chips can run up to 1.6 GHz. Since this video card accesses the memory at 1.5 GHz, there is very little room for memory overclocking inside the memory’s specifications. But of course you can try overclock it over its specs.

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Figure 6: 1.2 ns GDDR3 memory chip used by ATI Radeon X1800 XT reference board.

The reference board has video capture function (VIVO), using ATI Rage Theater chip.

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Figure 7: ATI Rage Theater chip for video capture.