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The power conscious chip, G84.

Taking off the moderately sized heatsink sits G84. It's much, much smaller than G80 thanks to its 284m transistors and 80nm process, die size is only 169mm². Compare that to G80, which has 681m transistors and a die size of 481mm².

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Foxconn's card sticks to the reference design here, which is not all that surprising at this stage, the only difference here is the Foxconn branding on the top of the heatsink. The 8600 GTS is a little shorter than a 7900 GT at just 187mm. As already mentioned, NVIDIA state a 71W power draw at full load, and you'll find a 6-pin PCI-E connector on all GTS boards. The cooler for the 8600 GTS is decent enough and runs nice and quiet. Obviously the board supports SLI, and hopefully we'll be able to look at this some time in the future.

All the clocks are default speed, but there will be an overclocked version available in a few weeks time with 700 / 2200 clocks, i'd imagine the shader clock will stay the same.

The 8600 GTS (and GT) come with two dual link, HDCP enabled DVI-I outputs for connection to analog and digital monitors and HDTV's, and an S-Video port that supports composite and component outputs. This is the first graphics card on the market to support HDCP over dual link.

In the box you'll find:

• A paper manual.
• A driver CD including Foxconn's"Foxware Overclock Utility".
• Two additional CD's with Restore IT 7.0 and Virtual Drive Pro 10.0.
• analog VGA adaptors
• An s-video dangle.
• A 6-pin PCI-e to dual 4-pin model adaptor for those running older power supplies.

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Samsung BJ1A 1.0ns memory chips

The memory chips found on the Foxconn are Samsung's 1.0ns flavour with a theoretical top end of 1000 MHz, so perhaps not much overclocking headroom here, we'll find out later.

And finally, you get a 2-year warranty just incase you encounter any hiccups down the road. Foxconn are expecting this card to hit all the main retailers early next week with a RRP of £130.