The Card
Taking a look at the actual card, you can see that it is quite big. The card is HUGE. It is not overly huge in terms of weight or even girth, but in length. This card is longer than your ATX motherboard. This card is longer than the long side of your favorite magazine. This card is 10.5+ inches. It is pretty long. It is so long that we dare say many users will run into problems installing it in their mid-tower cases, or on motherboards that make extended use of the area around the edge of the board directly behind the PCI-e x16 slots. The next thing to notice on the card is either the cooler or the power sockets, depending on… what you noticed first. The cooler on this card is nothing too far out of the ordinary. It consists of an oversized copper heatsink and a centrifugal fan. An interesting thing to note about this cooling solution is that there is only one heatpipe incorporated in the design. We typically see more elaborate heatpipe designs in cooling solutions these days, from NVIDIA in particular. This doesn’t really say anything about the effectiveness of the cooler, and seeing as how the card did not get overly hot during our testing, it certainly isn’t inadequate.



In terms of power, the G80 requires not one, but two 6-pin PCI-e power connections to operate nominally. An interesting tidbit of info that you more than likely will not find anywhere else but right here at GotFrag Hardware is that there was initially one 6-pin and one 8-pin power socket on the G80 in the early reference model. The idea for this 8-pin connector still eludes us however, as it was not a standard EPS12V connector, not that any looney would think to use that on a video card. Nevertheless, it was there and we should have some pictures up in the future to prove it if it hasn’t already been proven elsewhere. For the time being you can simply take a look at the back of the board where 8 leads can clearly be seen next to 6. We assume that the purpose of having multiple PCI-e connectors on the card is to distribute the load more evenly across the +12V rails of the power supply. The ATX 2.2 standard for power supplies allows for a maximum amperage on a single +12V rail of 20A. Since the maximum output of a single +12V rail is then theoretically 240A, far below the load consumption of the 8800GTX, splitting the load across multiple +12V rails (2 separate power connectors) is a pretty good idea. There is more to it than that, and in fact you can get more than 240W out of a +12V rail on the ATX 2.2 standard, but we believe that this is likely the basis for NVIDIA’s decision to use multiple power connectors.


While we would love nothing more than to dismantle this card and show you its guts, we will not be doing that today. You can see from the label on the fan that this card was manufactured by ASUS. Well, we did not receive this card from ASUS or NVIDIA, and it is not really ours to begin with. As confident as we are in our dismantling skills, we don’t feel comfortable with potentially destroying someone elses’ $550 video card. Also, since we did not receive this card from ASUS, and it is in fact using NVIDIA’s reference design, the manufacturer of the card is of little importance and will not be addressed further in this review.