The active heatsink that comes with this video card is very simple, as you can see in Figure 4. In Figure 5, you can see the video card with the heatsink removed, and we were surprised to see only solid capacitors and ferrite chokes, giving this card a top-notch component quality.

click to enlarge
Figure 4: Heatsink.

click to enlarge
Figure 5: Video card with heatsink removed.

The reviewed card uses eight 1 Gbit GDDR3 chips (four soldered on the component side of the printed circuit board, four soldered on the solder side), making its 1 GB video memory. The chips used are K4W1G1646E-HC11 parts from Samsung, which support up to 900 MHz – and on this video card they are already working at their maximum clock rate.

click to enlarge
Figure 6: Memory chip.

In Figure 7, you can see the accessories that come with the reviewed card: a generic manual, a driver CD and the two I/O brackets that we mentioned before that allow you to covert this video card into a “slim” (“half-height”) product.

click to enlarge
Figure 7: Accessories.

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.