Package and Contents

One of the first thing you'll notice about the card is the huge in-house designed heatsink cooler. This cooler, not only look mighty impressive, but it also offers total silence with no fans. It features 4 copper heatpipes with two large arrays of aluminum fins for maximum heat dissipation. One of the aluminum arrays sits directly over the GPU, while the other protrudes out through one of the backplates.  

          

As far as connectivity is concerned, there are two DVI connectors and one S-Video out, which is more enough. However, there wasn't any Display Port or HDMI connectors, which I thought was a little disappointing, as it could deter possible HTPC users. But mind you ... this is an engineering review sample and not the final product. So there might be a slight change to the final specifications at launch date. 

Installation

Installation was straight forward with no problems at all. The card only uses 2 PCIe slot space, and that's beacuse of the large in-house designed heatpipe cooler. The protruding aluminum fins on one of the arrays can be a little tricky to fit ... you'll probably need to angle the card first before inserting it into the PCIe slot.

Driver installation was very simple ... no further comment here. In our benchmark tests, we used the Nvidia's Forceware drivers version 174.16, which supports Windows Vista and the latest 9600GT (G94 GPUs).