The NVIDIA NV40

Because it is an engineering sample, it came in nothing more than an anti-static bag. Let's check it out!

Below is a shot we took of the card with its cooler removed.

It is a 256MB card with eight DDR3 memory chips, all of them arranged in a semi-circle around the GPU. More on the memory chips later.

Unlike what we have seen in the past, this card came with only one Molex power connector. Does this mean that NVIDIA has managed to cut down on the card's power requirement?

Here is a closer look of the NV40 GPU. As you can see, it looks like an A1 revision silicon. We are not sure if this is the final revision though.

But instead of leaving the core bare as we have seen in previous NV40 pictures, NVIDIA has apparently decided to protect the core with a heat-spreader in the A1 core.

Our source tells us that is because the heavy cooler has caused many cores to be chipped in previous engineering samples. The heat-spreader was also added to improve the thermal transfer from the core to the cooler.

Now, let's take a look at the DDR3 memory chips. In this card, NVIDIA used the 256Mbit Samsung K4J55323QF DDR3 memory chips.

Terribly sorry about the poor quality of the picture. No matter how much we tried to clean the image up, it remained just as blur.

But a check of Samsung's website revealed that the memory chips were rated for a clock speed of 700MHz. Therefore, they provide the NV40 with a whopping memory bandwidth of 44.8GB/s! Wow!

You can find out more about the Samsung K4J55323QF here!