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A Closer Look:
A closer look at the card itself has a startling
revelation... PASSIVE COOLING! The last card I owned
with passive cooling was my
old VooDoo3. One good thing about passive cooling
is tha lack of noise. The little fans on actively
cooled VGA cards is usually the one at a very irritating
frequency due to their small diameter and high speeds.
The I/O panel has the now standard
3 ports: 15 pin, S-Video and DVI out
One thing worth noting: The heat sink doesn't even
touch the memory chips… Between the lack of a fan
and no way for the memory to dissipate heat, I don't
expect much from overclocking here.
An interesting detail is that all of the components
are mounted on the front of the card. This design
will lend itself to keeping all of the RAM at consistent
temps on models that offer active cooling since they
are all situated around the GPU core.
Under the massive heat sink we see
that the thermal grease barely covers the core. I'm
glad I took this apart so that I can properly coat
it.
Here we have the GeFORCE FX 5200 core
in all it's glory, ready to be slathered in grease
again and put through the wringer.
With our cavity search fully complete, it's time
to install this baby and see what she offers in terms
of performance.
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