GIGABYTE 7600GS HDMI GV-NX76G256HI-RH Video Card Review :: GIGABYTE GV-NX76G256HI-RH Card

The 7600GS HDMI card is about the most unique 7600GS I have ever seen. GIGABYTE decided to cool it with their Silent Pipe technology, meaning that there is no cooling fan on the card. This consists of a big heatsink covering the graphics chip, with a heatpipe running through the heatsink leading out to a fin. The heatsink covers the card's central area horizontally. As a consequence of the way the heatsink is designed, the card only requires a single slot cooling solution rather than the two-slot solution found on other similarly cooled cards.

Heatsink

Side View

"Lock"

Capacitors

PCI Express

Front of PCB

GIGABYTE outfitted the card with 256MB of Hynix 2.5ns DDR2 memory in two rows of 4 memory chips. The memory is clocked at 800MHz, the rated speed for 2.5ns DDR2 memory. The choice of memory is interesting, as most graphics cards use GDDR3 memory, even the mainstream parts like the 7600GS. Graphics cards with GDDR-4 memory have been released but not in the numbers that would indicate mass production and low prices. The memory interface is 128-bit, giving the 7600GS a memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/second.

HDMI connector

Rear IO

The key feature of this card is support for the new HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) standard. Instead of having two DVI-I ports or a D-Sub+ DVI-I port, the 7600GS has a single DVI-I port and a HDMI port. I'll cover the HDMI standard in the Features area of the review. You can either install two Digital LCDs, a LCD+CRT, a HDTV or any combination of them together. There is also a TV-Out port to use the video card on your television or HDTV set.