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The rather chunky G80 core

Of course, under the big heatpipe assisted heatsink we find the illustrious, "king kong" sized G80. Being a "GTS" it comes with only 96 Stream processors active as opposed to the full 128 found on the more expensive 8800 GTX.

G80 is a massive piece of silicon by anyone's standards (perhaps not Jordan's...). If you thought R580 was big, think again. G80 is 681m transistor part built using a 90nm process, which means the die size is mammoth -- 481mm˛. Compare that to R580, which has 384m transistors and a die size of 352mm˛.

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Gainward's card sticks closely to the reference design, the only difference to be found here is the heatsink's intense red clothing, which look rather striking in my opinion. This means the PCB and cooler are both familiar ground to all, but considering the reference cooler is nice and quiet while doing a good job of keeping the card cool, there isn't much incentive to change.

As you would expect, both DVI ports are dual-link, and in the box you'll find to analog VGA adaptors for those of you still running CRT's or the more affordable TFT's out there. You'll also find:

• A paper manual.
• A driver CD including Gainward's "ExpertTool".
• Two additional CD's with Cyberlink Power DVD 6 and the DVD solution suite
• An S-video to component cable
• A 6-pin PCI-e to dual 4-pin model adaptor for those running older power supplies.

As you should have guessed by now, this card is a Golden Sample, so it's a factory overclocked card. It runs with a core clock of 550 MHz, and a memory clock of 880 MHz, which is a reasonable speed bump over the NVIDIA reference GTS 320 MB. The Shader clock is the standard 1200 MHz affair which you would find on any stock 8800 GTS.

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Hynix 1.1ns memory chips

The memory chips used here are Hynix 1.1ns chips with a theoretical top end of 900 MHz, so there should be some headroom here for memory overclocking, i guess we'll find out soon enough.