The Card

The ASUS EN8800GTX takes up two slots, thanks to its massive cooler. The cooler covers almost the entire front of the card. In comparison, the back of the card is totally bare.

The top half of the bracket is occupied by a row of vents. Unfortunately, the cooler does not exhaust all of the hot air out these vents. In fact, this picture shows you the five vents in the shroud where some of the hot air is vented out.

There are also vents on the underside of the heatsink where hot air is exhausted. So, it's quite doubtful that much of the hot air will actually get vented out the case.

The lower half of the bracket is home to a 7-pin HDTV-out mini-din connector and two dual-linked DVI ports. This new 7-pin connector allows you to directly plug in an S-video cable without using a dongle. You will still need to use the dongle if you want YPrPb (component) or composite outputs.

Although this view from the top appears to show the heatsink tapering off at the end to exhaust the hot air out the vents, that's actually not quite true. More on that later...

Unlike the GeForce 7900 GTX which used a cooler with four heatpipes, this cooler makes use of only one heatpipe. In the bottom view of the card, you can make out the single heatpipe crossing diagonally across the length of the heatsink.

Now, let's go take a look under the huge cooler!