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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.
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Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 Memory Chip
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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?
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