Dismantling The Card

We dismantled the cooler to have a look under it, as well as to allow us to inspect the Zalman cooler. It wasn't very difficult. In fact, there were only four spring-loaded screws to remove. You don't even need a screwdriver. Just unscrew them using your fingers and voilà! the cooler pops off!

With the Zalman cooler removed, it's easy to take a closer look at the board itself. The card layout is neat, with the GeForce 8600 GTS GPU in the center and four GDDR3 memory chips arranged next to it.

You can also see the connector for the cooler's fan cable on the lower left corner and the socket for the 6-pin power connector on the upper right corner.

The G84 GPU (left) is covered in white thermal paste, with most of it smeared over the package, rather than the die. There is adequate coverage, but if you are gungho about overclocking it, you can replace it with your favourite thermal paste.

The actual G84 GPU looks like the picture NVIDIA provided (on the right). Well, now that we have shown you what it looks like, there's no need for you to remove the cooler just to take a peek at it..

Cooler

The Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS uses the Zalman VF900-Cu heatpipe cooler, instead of the NVIDIA reference cooler. It is a thick cooler which takes up more space than a single slot. So, you should leave the adjoining slot free for better air circulation.

The Zalman VF900-Cu cooler consists of a full copper heatsink with two heatpipes to quickly spread the heat out to the copper fins; and a large 80 mm fan to dissipate the heat quickly.

Nothing much is known about the fan, but if it's the same fan used in the retail VF900-Cu cooler, then it has two ball bearings and is capable of achieving spin rates of 2400 rpm with a noise level of only 25 dB.

However, this cooler does not support variable fan speeds (controlled by an external controller) and the card did not make use of the Zalman RAM heatsinks that came with the retail VF900-Cu cooler.