Moving onto the card itself, it’s all very standard looking. With only BFG Tech (water cooled model) and Sparkle (TEC model) using a different cooler, we continue to see the same cooler on all our samples except just a couple.
There isn’t a great reason to change the cooling though - it’s quiet and keeps things cool quite effectively. It’s also very standard for a high-end graphics card to take up two slots and cooling with a single slot cooler would be quite difficult without sacrificing something like noise levels.
The back of the card is of course very standard with just a large array of screws to keep the heatsink in place and our normal line up of stickers.
Flipping the card over again and having a closer look around, we can see the SLI connector at the top of the card, unfortunately we won’t be making use of it today. Like all GTS cards, there is only a single SLI connector, unlike the GTX model, which carries two for future technologies such as physics processing.
Like all GeForce 8800GTS cards, we have a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector. If you don’t have one of these connectors on your power supply, you will need to buy one separately, due to XFX not including a convertor in the package.
Moving to the front we have two DVI ports which both support Dual Link capabilities along with our TV Out port which accepts the included S-Video cable or Component out cable. They are also HDCP compatible which means you’ll be able to use this graphic card to playback protected movie content from HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.
XFX’s 8800GTS 320MB DDR3 XXX version is all very standard until we check out what’s under the hood.
The standard 8800GTS 320MB comes clocked at 500MHz on the core and 1600MHz DDR on the memory. XFX have taken it up a notch by offering 580MHz on the core and a huge 1800MHz DDR from the onboard GDDR-3 memory. We decided to see if we could get anymore out of it but you will have to wait till the overclocking page to see how we went.
