Package and Contents

This package comes with the basics to get you running, plus a few extra cables such as an s-video to Y-Pb-Pr cable for high quality video playback on TVs and also two DVI to VGA adaptor, and finally an s-video to s-video cable. Strangely there was no power cable for the VGA and on closer inspection of the VGA card itself we found that it didn't need any additonal power, a bonus point in my books.

No games bundled in this package.

Installation

MSI have come up with quite a clever heatpipe fanless cooling solution, where the copper block obviously sits ontop of the GPU core but the heatpipe directs the unwanted heat up into the array of fins that are located to the back of the VGA card. This allows for optimal heat transfer and dissipation using the common sense rule of "heat travels up".

 
Click to enlarge

However, I think MSI must have been to clever here, the array of fins at the back of the VGA card may cause some problems when it comes to installation. The fitting is very very tight against the chipset heatsink and on some mainboards you would not be able to fit another bank of RAM as shown in the photos below. And in some case the VGA card cannot be installed on other mainbaords as the northbridge chipset heatsink would obstruct the NX8600GT heatsink.

{imggallery 135}
Driver installation was very simple since it uses NVIDIA unified drivers... no further comment here.