GPU Cooler

As mentioned earlier, the ASUS Extreme N7300GS used the same GPU cooler design used in the NVIDIA reference design.

This consists of a low speed fan integrated with a aluminium heatsink to form a low-profile cooler. The entire assembly is then held tight to the GPU by two spring-loaded plunge clips.

Up : Side view of the cooler Left : The cooler

The heatsink has a simple design with very small fins at the bottom and sides. If you look closely at the side view of the cooler above, you can see just how small the fins are on the aluminium heatsink.

This creates space in the center of the heatsink for the fan. By placing the fan within the recessed space, the entire cooler has a very low profile. Of course, its thermal dissipation performance is another issue altogether.

We then removed the cooler from the card to see what kind of thermal interface was used, as well as to find out more about the fan.

Card with the cooler removed	The cooler disassembled

Removing it was easy. Just depress the clips at the end of the plunge clips and they will pop out.

Pulling out the cooler, we found that ASUS used thermal tape to as the thermal interface between the GPU and the base of the heatsink. There was certainly a lot more thermal tape than was needed to cover the small chip.

Take a look at the "naked" NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS GPU. As you can see, it's using the FC-BGA packaging. Thanks to its 90nm fabrication process, the chip itself isn't very big even when there are 112 million transistors inside.

Disassembling the cooler was easy. Just remove three small screws and slide out the fan.

Although there are no markings on the fan to tell us the actual power output, it's unlikely to differ much, if at all, from the 2.16W fan used in the NVIDIA reference design.

The Memory Chips

Following the NVIDIA reference design, ASUS chose to use the Infineon HYB18T256161AFL-25 memory chips.

These are 256Mb (32MB) DDR2 SDRAM chips with a rated clock speed of 400MHz and both core and IO voltages of 1.8V. ASUS has, however, overclocked them just a little to 405MHz (810MHz DDR).

It would be interesting to see how much further these memory chips will go. Because of the GeForce 7300 GS' narrow memory bus width, its memory bandwidth will be a key determinant of its performance.

This particular card has a 128MB memory buffer. Hence the presence of four of these memory chips, two on each side of the PCB.

But should you require more graphics memory than that, the GeForce 7300 GS supports NVIDIA's TurboCache technology which allows the card to make use of system memory as graphics memory.

External Connectors

The first picture below shows you the output options on this card. You have the standard 15-pin VGA-out connector on the left, the S-Video output in the middle and the DVI port on the right. If you need another VGA-out port, you can use the included DVI-to-VGA converter to convert the DVI port into a VGA-out port.

The second picture shows you a closer look of the gray box which nicely covered the necessary connection between the extra VGA-out port and the PCB.

Up : Output options Right : VGA-out connector box

Although this may seem like a small point, the gray box does make the card look better than its competitors. Nothing makes a graphics card look cheaper than a loose cable connecting an output ports to the PCB.