GIGABYTE 3D1-68GT: Double fun
Cooling system.
A few more photos.
Front view, in a different perspective. See the height of the radiator. The height is so large that it can easily fit a pretty big cooler. As you understand, the neighboring PCI slot will be overlapped completely. It is not recommended to install something into the second PCI slot. You can inadvertently block the air inflow to the cooler. The radiator cover with a proprietary label is needed not for nicety alone. It serves to direct air flow along the radiator fins that run in parallel to the longer side of the video card over the whole length.
Front view with the lid removed. As can be seen from the photo, the radiator installed on the front side of the video card is made up of two parts. Why do you think it is so? The answer is evident - to provide a thorough pressing of the radiator to each of the GPUs. With a solid radiator, that would have been very difficult to do. Since there is only a thin layer of thermal paste between the GPU and the radiator, a very precise alignment of the VPUs in height and plane would be needed, or the thermal paste would have to be replaced with the so-called "thermo chewing-gum", which would substantially deteriorate the cooling mode of video chips already hot enough.
The rear view. As you can see, a cooler is there on the reverse side either. The increased video memory capacity is to blame for that. The radiator's dimensions (for video memory alone!) are indeed enviable for any video card of the middle price range. Such solution looks a bit redundant but is logical enough in terms of the general concept of building a cooling system.
The radiator that closes power elements of the supply system in this regard almost interflows with the main radiator. The concept has touched upon it either.
This is how the radiators look from the reverse side when removed. All the surfaces are polished almost to the mirror gleam and leave the most favorable condition. But that doesn't play a big part for the memory chips because thermo-gums are used as the thermo interface. As can be seen from the photo, radiators are fastened not to the PCB but to one another thus forming sort of a "bread-and-butter" inside which the video card is fitted into.
Let's see what is hidden under this massive splendor.
See how tightly the components are positioned. The seemingly empty spots are in fact cobwebs of tracks leading to the memory chips. As you can see, the second VPU is turned 45 degrees relative to the first one. You might expect that the overall pattern of positioning of the video memory chips relative to the GPU will be preserved and turned in a similar way - nevertheless, that is not the case. A simply turn would require increasing the PCB size. Engineers at Gigabyte decided not to look for easy ways and demonstrated miracles of resourcefulness.
This is how one of the two GPUs installed onboard looks. It was produced on the 13th week of year 2005. Don't be confused by the number of production week. Running ahead, I'd rather say that during the tests both processors showed themselves more than with dignity.
The memory made by Samsung offers 1.6 ns access time, which makes maximum 1200 MHz DDR operating speed. At the same time, the nominal frequency of the video memory for 3D1-68GT is 1000 MHz. Such a margin for video memory frequency lets one hope for a substantial performance boost of the video subsystem.
On the reverse side of the video card, the picture is fully identical - a lot of fine elements, dense assembly, another 8 memory chips.
At that, we'd rather stop scrutinizing the video card and move on to the benchmarks.
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