With all the boring bits out the way, we have a look at what we really want to see. The X1800XT is a good looking card with its red and white color scheme - the front of it shows us yet another picture of Ruby with her scary sword. The right of the card has a heatsink that runs up the side of the card to keep a few of those extra components a little cooler and the PCI Express power connector towards the top right corner.
Due to this card having the cover over the fins you dont see the copper fins that are used. If we just move to have a look at the side of the card though we can see that it uses the same setup as our reference card does with the copper fins used to dissipate the heat from the hottest area the core.
Turning the card over there isnt really much to see. While both nVidia and ATI use 512MB on their highest-end cards, with the memory layout used and density they are able to place all the modules on the front which means that they are all cooled via the fan that also cools the core. The X in the middle helps hold the cooler in the center with a number of other screws sitting out a little bit more to keep it straight and solid at all times. We have our normal information on the back as well which include model/serial and a few other random numbers that probably dont mean much to most people.
Moving over to the I/O side of things we find the double slot having to be used due to the large cooler being found on the card. We also have the dual DVI ports as we mentioned is shown on the front of the box and an S-Video looking port that helps make use of VIVO and HDTV out via the component cables, which we saw on the second page.
One of the best things about this card is the cooler, the build quality of the cooler just feels so good and solid which make it looks like it will cool very effectively.
