Up Close and Personal:::...

If I was manufacturing these cards I'd be far from thrilled that fitting the cooling solution involves the securing of a ridiculous 18 individual screws. I can't in all sincerity believe that the collective intelligence of NVIDIA and their manufacturing partners couldn't come up with something better than this! Not that it matters in any significant way other than surely adding to manufacturing cost and complexity to some degree.

I was pleased to see the GPU had a good, even layer of thermal gunk applied, though I'd wiped it off to take the picture below. The rear of the aluminium sink that sits on top of it remains as furrowed and scarred as ever though and I couldn't bring myself to put it back without a splash of Nanotherm and a quick rub over with a fine grit sandpaper. This was after I'd run the overclocking tests so they were carried out au natural as it were.

The card comes equipped with 256MB of Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 GDDR3 memory rated to run at a maximum speed of 500MHz. The card is clocked at 500MHz out of the box which, as you can imagine, leaves little room for overclocking, theoretically at least.

Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 Memory Chip

Something we don't often think about when it comes to the memory that resides on our graphics cards is latency, though as you can see from the chart below, the Samsung chips on this card trade a lower clock speed for slightly better CAS ratings.

Before we get to the numbers how about a quick wander through the bundled software?