Dismantling The Card

We removed the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT's cooler to have a look under it. It wasn't very difficult even though the cooler had 12 spring-loaded screws holding it in place. It was merely a matter of unscrewing all of them and twisting the cooler off.

The new G92 GPU certainly looks much smaller than the G80 GPU on the GeForce 8800 GTX. The package is still pretty big though, with a metal shim around the GPU die. The GPU is flanked on three sides by eight GDDR3 memory chips.

Graphics Memory

The GeForce 8800 GT comes with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. This reference card used eight Qimonda HYB18H512321BF-10 memory chips, each with a capacity of 512 Mbits. For those who do not already know it, Qimonda is actually Infineon's memory division spun-off as a separate company.

The -10 speed grade is currently the second-fastest speed grade for this memory chip, specifying a maximum frequency of 1 GHz. Since NVIDIA is only running them at 900 MHz, this gives the GeForce 8800 GT some overclocking potential, as far as memory is concerned.

The eight memory chips are all placed on the front of the card, arranged around the GPU. They are all attached to the heatsink at raised contact points using thermal tape.

Primarion 3544

Hidden on the back of the PCB is the small Primarion 3544 chip. It is a 4-phase digital multi-phase power controller with a switching frequency of up to 2 MHz. It also has a I²C interface that allows for real-time system monitoring and control.

This multi-phase power controller delivers power to the graphics core by converting power from the PCI Express slot and power connector to four parallel, synchronously-rectified power channels.